By: Al Pavangkanan
Taking inventory is a prepping basic. If you don’t know what you have, you don’t know what you need. This is true whether you’re talking about food storage, survival tools, or in the case of today’s episode, your technology preps.
Technology is fragile and this makes keeping track of what we have even more important. An inventory of your important items is just the first step in ensuring that you have some redundancy for when things do break. You don’t have to be a computer or technology expert to do this but even an expert might learn something from this exercise (I did!) 
Originally I had planned to cover hardware, software and data in this episode, but the hardware portion ran much longer than I expected. So I’ll be covering the software and data portion in the next episode.
Listen in as I cover:
- Why taking inventory is important.
- What kinds of items should be included.
- What details should you include in your inventory list.
- What benefits are there to having this list even if there is no disaster to deal with.
Resources / Links
You mentioned your family is mostly paperless, so when you do lists & copies of information (like the software details), do you then scan those to PDF & include it with your backups/load it on e-readers, or do you have hard copies with the disks? Or maybe both? Redundancy is a good thing.
For me most of those lists never start as paper. I keep everything I can in electronic form to start with. I created those inventory PDFs more for inspiration than anything else. I use an open source product called “Zim Wiki” for the majority of my lists that I create. I used to use Evernote but it was overkill for my needs. Zim Wiki stores everything as a plain text file with some special formatting rules. I have it configured to save everything to my Dropbox folder and it get’s backed up every night. Because it’s in my Dropbox, I can get to it from anywhere I have internet access and since the files are just plain text files I can’t view and edit them even without the Zim Wiki app. It’s also a cross platform application (Windows and Linux) and by using it with Dropbox I have access to it all on my Android tablet.