Household recovery file

Brief

Create the file your household would need after a fire, theft, flood, or emergency evacuation: a room-by-room property inventory plus an index to important records. The challenge is evidence and recovery, not collecting sensitive information. Dated photos, serial numbers, receipt locators, ownership notes, and secure offsite access should let another authorized person understand what existed without turning the file into a master key for the household.

Personalize

• Your recovery scenarios. Choose two realistic events and state what evidence and records each would require.
• Your high-value exceptions. Decide which items need individual photos, serial numbers, receipts, or appraisals and which can be grouped.
• Your authorized helper. Pick one trusted person who will test retrieval and report what is unclear, inaccessible, or overexposed.

Milestones

1. Scope, privacy rules, authorized readers, storage plan, and item schema written before collecting data.
2. Room walkthrough completed with dated overview images and stable item or group IDs.
3. Important items linked to model, serial, ownership, condition, and receipt or value evidence where available; unknowns stay labeled.
4. Important-document index created using locations and record types, without copying full identifiers into the index.
5. Working copy encrypted; protected offsite copy created; restore tested on a different device.
6. Authorized helper runs a recovery scenario, records every gap, and confirms the final handoff after fixes.

Done means

• Every room is covered by a dated visual inventory
• Important items have evidence or an explicit missing-evidence note
• Values are labeled by source and are never invented
• Sensitive identifiers and credentials are absent from the working index
• Encrypted offsite restore works on a second device
• An authorized helper completed a retrieval test and the result is recorded