Imagine yourself wandering lost, hungry, cold, and possibly injured in the German forests. You find what is obviously a hollow rock. Salvation at last! What might be inside? A sleeping bag? A tarp? Emergency rations and fresh drinking water? The first aid supplies you need so deperately? No, you idiot, stop guessing already. IT’S A ROUTER! Filled with survival information. But you can’t access that information. If you had a working phone you would have already called for help.
For digital file copies, pick a company that will not fade away into the night (Google, Microsoft and Amazon come to mind) and use their cloud storage protocol. If your files are small enough to fit the free their, use 2 or more. Obviously upload your files in an encrypted container to protect yourself from data breaches.
If there is a disaster that destroys my local backups, These giants will still be around with their hyper redundant systems. If the disaster destroys my local backups and these giants, then I’m not going to need my digital files, and am likely dead anyways.
Do you have a specific recommendation with regard to that step?
The obvious mod would be to add an external USB port that is powered by the thermoelectric generator.
Then, all you need to do is read the documents stored in the rock on how to build a fire… err, wait…
And I would use my last remaining caloric energy to smash that fucken thing into oblivion, just before I joined it.[quote=“chgoliz, post:4, topic:73065”]
Do you have a specific recommendation with regard to that step?
[/quote]
Using TrueCrypt, or some variation thereof, to encrypt specific files, or to encrypt whole virtual disks, which can then be copied or moved as you might copy or move any other digital file.
That’s one hell of an interesting bit of collection development for our unfindable survival rock:
When you are tired of megacorps, you are tired of life!
TrueCrypt or the rebuild fork (I forget the name) would be the gold standard. But a password protected .zip file is better then plaintext. If you use Windows Pro, Bitlocker has an encrypted volume tool. For Mac you can use Disk Utility to create and encrypt volumes as well.
EncryptEverything
Or you could just leave a survival book and some supplies in a sealed container.
7zip aes256 encrypted, with a looong passphrase. It’s really, really easy.
@doctorow’s “Neuenkirchen, Germany” is a good enough location for a US site, but Aram’s “Neuenkirchen, Niedersachsen” is mischievous: In the state of Lower Saxony ~ 10 municipalities are named Neuenkirchen 
If you don’t like megacorps, you could use an out of town family member or friend, but they are likely to lose or erase and use your drive.
The companies I mentioned are not likely to fail overnight. There will be time to move your data if they begin to fail. And if there is a local or regional disaster, these companies will still exist and the data will be there when you regain access.
I’m sure there are some smaller companies that could provide this service, but it’d be harder to research.
I drive my knife into Li poly battery in router use that to start fire.
It’s not practical, it’s art, so it’s not much different than the Perler bead Pokemon portrait, other than that I’m more impressed with the Pokemon thing.
Could they at least leave a dynamo and some wires by it that I could you to get a spark to start a fire.
How is this not irony? Why wouldn’t it be better to have 4-5 copies of an insightfully-compiled paper book in the rock, protected by a combination lock (or fire activated lock)? And a few thumb drives with the info as well, so the Burning Man set approves?
It would be better to have matches.
Seriously. This is straight out of a LucasArts adventure game.
Light fire
Use fire on rock
Use laptop on rock
Read survival documents
Build shelter
Etc.
Have we not already established that I’m over the “pick your favorite song/poem and use the first letters in each line” concept of passphrases?
There must be at least one new church in every town, right?
