Author: Dan Maloney / Source: Hackaday
Your eyes pop open in the middle of the night, darting around the darkened bedroom as you wonder why you woke up. Had you heard something? Or was that a dream? The matter is settled with loud pounding on the front door. Heart racing as you see blue and red lights playing through the window, you open the door to see a grim-faced police officer standing there.
“There’s been a hazardous materials accident on the highway,” he intones. “We need to completely evacuate this neighborhood. Gather what you need and be ready to leave in 15 minutes.”Most people will live their entire lives without a scenario like this playing out, but such things happen all the time. Whether the disaster du jour is man-made or natural, the potential to need to leave in a big hurry is very real, and it pays to equip yourself to survive such an ordeal. The primary tool for this is the so-called “bugout bag,” a small backpack for each family member that contains the essentials — clothing, food, medications — to survive for 72 hours away from home.
A bugout bag can turn a forced evacuation from a personal emergency into a minor inconvenience, as those at greatest risk well know — looking at you, Tornado Alley. But in our connected world, perhaps it pays to consider updating the bugout bag to include the essentials of our online lives, those cyber-needs that we’d be hard-pressed to live without for very long. What would a digital bugout bag look like?
Grab That Phone
It pays to think about the specs before designing any system, of course, so for the purposes of this article, let’s define our bugout scenario as a natural disaster of local to regional scope — think hurricane, flood, tornado, ice storm, etc.
We’ll assume this will require you to leave your home for three days or so, and that you’ll have to travel to another location — a shelter set up by local emergency management authorities, perhaps, or even to the home of a friend or relative outside the impacted area. Let’s also assume that we can expect at least some disruption of infrastructure as a result of the disaster — lines may be down, power may be out, and cell phone service may be spotty.Let’s further stipulate that our digital bugout bag will be part of our regular bugout bag, as opposed to a separate backpack or bag. Whatever we want to take with us will have to fit in the space between our sweatpants, undies, and MREs.
The center of most people’s online life today is the smartphone, so that’ll be the first thing in the bag. In fact, if you’ve had any heads up on the disaster brewing around you, you’ve probably been on the phone pretty much constantly, checking out the situation….
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