My wife and I have been on a year-long quest to make our household disaster proof and I have to tell you, it's a long road. Hurricane Rita (we live in Houston) hit when we were about half done. Along the way we even started a photo and slide scanning business called Affordable Scans (www.affordablescans.com) to help other people become disaster survivable. But I'd say that even now, we're only about 90% safe and have a couple more months left to get to 100%. Here are some tips I can offer in hindsight:

GET ORGANIZED! - Run through everything you have of value, throw away anything you don't really need and give everything you want to keep a well defined home. If you can't find it or define what's important or not, you can't protect it. Getting organized can also be a huge money saver. Before we started the disaster recovery project we were looking at moving into houses that cost $100K more because it just seemed like we needed more room. Now we're still in the same house and have a ton of entra space... we even sold off some shelves in a yard sale and our garage (which used to be packed) has nothing on the ground and two sets of empty shelves waiting to be filled. What I'm saying that is you get organized, the set of things you need to protect is probably going to be a lot smaller than you think, small enough to be manageable. From what we've seen, the things people really care about are things like photos, slides, family videos and important financial/estate documents.

Take record keeping seriously - You have no chance at protecting your records if you didn't even keep them when you get them. Come up with an organizational system and stick to it. Even if you could cast a spell and magically protect all the stuff you have, you'll still have new records coming in and without a record keeping system you're going to leave yourself exposed. Here a mini-tip - throw away the extra envelopes and random ads that come with your financial statements, just keep the statement itself. We reduced the storage space for our financial documents by 50-60% just by getting rid of things like that.

Get your stuff scanned in - Scanners are widely available, hard disks are cheap, recordable DVDs are cheap. Take advantage of them and get your stuff into electronic format so you make multiple copies of them and put them somewhere where the disaster isn't. Our personal vision is to be able to get on a place with a small DVD set of everything we have. Again, we're only about 90% of the way to the vision because we didn't figure out that "get organized" part until about half way through, but it's a good vision.

As for backup, I've probably been trying to come up with the ultimate backup scheme for more than a decade. So here are my thoughts on that subject:

Have a well defined backup strategy - We back up our PCs to a Buffalo Tech USB hard drive (www.buffalotech.com). It's great (it powers down automatically when you unplug the USB cable or turn off your PC) and easy to move around to whatever PC needs it. Then I sync it to a second USB hard disk to have an extra copy. Then (less frequently) I back the drive up to a set of DVDs that can go in the safety deposit box. For a long time I've been backing up to DVDs only, but now that our data set has gotten larger and we add to our archive often (to maintain the disaster preparedness), using the USB hard drives is the only practical solution. The only way to be truly safe (on any type of media) is to have multiple independent up to date copies.

Find the right backup software - I've found that lack of good software is a strong deterrent to doing backups. After trying dozens on backup programs over the years, I've settled on two key pieces of software. SyncBack (www.2brightsparks.com) is what I use to synchronize my PCs to my USB hard drives. It costs $25, but if you dig down on their web page they have an older version that they release as freeware. I used the free version for a while but now I use the real paid version. The nice part about the SyncBackSE license is that for the $25, you get to use it on 5 of your PCs. Another thing I like is that it gives you the option of displaying all of the actions it's going to take while backing up your data before actually doing anything, really useful when your first getting organized and don't want to delete something by accident. TrueCrypt (www.truecrypt.org) is another great piece of software. It lets you create encrypted files that get mapped like real drives so you can keep your data secure without having to go through a special program to get to them.

Separate your data into new and old sets - We organize our data into folders based on time, like 1998, 1999, 2000. Now that we're organized and aren't adding to the older years, we don't have to keep on making more and more copies of the old stuff. That lets us focus on maintaing up to date copies of the new stuff.