Take pictures of your important documents (driver's license, passport, birth certificate, etc.) and store them securely with an app that will sync to your computers and mobile devices.
- Download a secure data management app like 1Password. 1Password isn't free, and there are other good apps out there, but it's cheap, excellent, syncs across Windows/Mac/iOS/Android and lets you attach arbitrary notes and files to records. The rest of this article assumes you're using 1Password on a desktop computer.
- Set up 1Password with a long, difficult-to-guess master password that you do not use anywhere else. Here are some great tips on choosing secure but easy-to-remember passwords.
I strongly recommend putting 1Password on both your computer and
your smartphone, then setting up syncing so you always have access
to your data.
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Gather your important documents. Start with whatever you have on hand, like your driver's license, but track down your passport, birth certificate, social security card, insurance cards, etc. as soon as you can. Some is better than none.
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Scan or take a photo of each document! Both sides, unless the back is blank. If you don't have a scanner that's fine: Just use your smartphone's camera—but make sure you have lots of light. If your phone has a decent flash you can use that; otherwise if you have a window that has a lot of light coming in right now (even if it's overcast outside), use the windowsill or scoot a table over by the window to take photos on. Artificial light (i.e. indoor lighting) will suffice only if it's bright and direct. Trust me on this.
For extra credit crop the photos and orient them correctly. For documents with multiple sides/pages it can be nice to save them as a single PDF. There are good smartphone apps for this: I've had success with Genius Scan and CamScanner. They help you crop and straighten documents and enhance them to make them more readable. They're also really useful every time some business stuck in 1998 wants you to sign something and send it back to to them. Fuck fax machines.
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Get the photos onto your computer. If you used your smartphone the easiest way is usually to just email the files to yourself.
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Back in 1Password, create a record for each document. 1Password has templates for most things. For example, for your passport click on File > New Item... > New Wallet Item, then choose Passport and click Add. Manually enter as much information as you can.
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This is the important part! Attach the photo/scan to the record in 1Password. When you're editing a record you'll see a large "Attachments" box at the bottom. Just drag the photos/PDF of the document onto it. When you're done, click Save.
That was a lot of steps, but it'll pay off a hundred times over. Having these pictures and data available, securely, on your computer and smartphone means you can keep the hard-to-replace paper copies in your fire safe (you do have a fire safe, right?) where they belong, but still access them instantly when you need to.
1Password is a great app (note: I've received nothing for pimping their product; I'm just a genuine fan). I've cheerfully paid for it on both Mac and iPhone. While the name is 1Password, I use it (as the above illustrates) for managing a lot of non-password information. Here are some things I find it useful for:
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My wallet. Every card in my wallet is also in 1Password's "Wallet," including my credit cards, but also my Costco card, library card, etc. This comes in handy a lot when, say, I want to put a book on hold or reserve a rental car without getting out of bed.
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Checking account and routing numbers. I find myself needing these numbers more often than I find myself writing a physical check, so digging up my checkbook just to find them is absurd.
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Notes. I use the "Notes" field a lot to annotate records with things like customer support phone numbers, account information, answers to "security" questions†, etc.
†So-called security questions are a ridiculous farce in which I decline to participate. Instead I use danah boyd's Algorithms For Dumb Security Questions technique.
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Filling out forms online. Okay this is probably obvious, but 1Password's browser addons are great, not just for logging into web sites but also for automatically filling address and payment forms.
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Generating passwords. I use a simple algorithm for coming up with passwords 95% of the time so I never use the same password on two different sites, but when security is particularly important I let 1Password generate a long, truly (pseudo)random password for me. Its password generator has settings to control how long the password is and how many and what kind of special characters it has.
- Waiting room questionnaire bullshit. I'll never get over the fact that doctor's offices think I ought to know the address of my spouse's employer off the top of my head. Every time one of these questionnaires comes up with some new bullshit question, the first thing I do (after finding the goddamn answer) is file it away in 1Password.