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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's had all their stuff be burned, the one thing I would say is this - too many things that we saved were replaceable. The things that we missed were the ones that weren't. Even though you have an expensive fancy camera that you want to save, if that comes at the cost of leaving behind the quilt your grandmother made, leave the camera. Especially if you have fire insurance. Money can replace pricey things. It can't replace sentimental ones.

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The two most important things to save are data and personal irreplaceable items.

Data is easily saved by uploading to cloud storage, preferably more than one service. You should already be doing this, Google Drive is 15GB free, Dropbox is 2GB free. Usually that's enough for the most important documents. Google Photos has unlimited storage as long as your pictures are 16MP or less.

I'll admit that I don't have an overview of my irreplaceable items. Maybe I should do a mental list when I get home today.

This is great advice, which surprisingly few people follow.

A few years back I scanned all of our personal records, tax returns, visas, dog vaccinations etc and created a dedicated Box account with a Google Drive backup. It was a massive undertaking at the time, but now whenever we receive something new it's a pretty painless task to scan it and upload it to cloud storage.

An added bonus is that after years of stockpiling paper we now have virtually no paper records anymore other than the things that absolutely have to be: passports, SSNs, birth certificates etc.

The moment there's a longer blackout, you guys are out in the open. Nice.

Flickr has 1TB free for photos.

https://mega.nz/ does 50GB free

This is true. A friends parents house burned to the ground. At their advanced age, the only thing they complained about were all the sentimental items they lost. You can always buy a new camera, but man, those wedding pictures and ornaments aren't quite as replaceable.

Especially for older people. Back in the day they didn't have cameras as much and developing film was expensive. That wedding album might have the only photos you have of a relative that is now dead.

that's why ypu have Scan photos inside Google photos to backup them in cloud easily with smartphone without scanner

Yes you should do that. But it's easy to forget to do that.

I think I'm going to do an inventory this weekend just in case something similar happens to me. I need to know what sentimental stuff to grab in a hurry

Agreed. This exact scenario happened to me. I lost a great deal of things in the fire. The only thing I miss is the quilt my frandmother.made for me. I still get upset about it.

I'm feel for you, I lost my childhood photo albums in a garage fire. I still kick myself to this day :(

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