K, by now, you've probably got some water, some food, some supplies and a good idea about priorities. I would hope so, I've been gone a while... you know... life gets in the way like that. Which is exactly the point, my priorities came before this blog. But, now I'm caught up for a bit and suggest the next step. Back-ups and Documentation.
I was on the fence between this and home protection. I decided to go with back ups because a house fire or water line break is more likely than a violent home break in or societal collapse. If you are a home owner, you want a fire proof safe and hard copies of all your important documents like your car and house deeds, etc... but, also, technology being what it is, you can grab a 32 gig thumb drive and move all your important family pictures or digital files like digital reciepts and what not. Like, I have one drive in my fire proof safe, one at my dad's and one at my mom's. I back them up about every 2 months... well, I back one up and then rotate their locations, so I suppose at anyone time, the drive at my house is 4-6 months out of date. They have all my pictures and I've gone through the process of digitizing all my physical reciepts.
There are also online back up sources that I personally haven't tapped into yet, but probably will eventually. If anyone has any info on the pros and cons, I'd love to hear it in the comments section. I suppose I have tested the online storage a bit with Zune Marketplace (stopped buying physical movies and started buying a license right from Microsoft so I can download or stream the movies and they take up no more physical space), and I love it.
All of this makes you more mobile, which is a good thing. Obviously, if you are creating a homestead, you probably aren't thinking of mobility, but if you lose your job and the only place you can find a new job is North Dakota (or if you are in North Dakota, the only job you can find is somewhere else, like Texas), then the ability to pick up a safe or thumb drive, and go and you have all your important documents is extremly important.
Aside from documentation of your assets, you can also create a physical inventory of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). This could be with books like Surviving The End of the World As We Know It, Rainwater Harvesting, or your own binders with How To's on skinning animals, purifying water, nuclear disaster actions... whatever you think is important to have if you don't have access to digital media for a while.
