While we’ve talked about using USB Flash Drives to hold your life in times of disaster, as part of that preparedness you can use these devices to help save trees. The first step is simply requesting to receive your statements online instead of receiving paper statements from your banks, credit cards, cell phone carriers and sometimes even your utilities. Usually, the online statements come in the universal PDF format so you may want to grab the latest Adobe Reader, or better yet FoxIT Reader which is an alternative to Adobe’s Reader. While you can save these on your computer, being the Geek I am, I need multiple copies of important data and I want to store that data securely especially if it is mobile.
The IronKey 4GB Secure Hardware-Encrypted Flash Drive fits the bill perfectly using always on AES encryption capable of encrypting everything written to the drive on the fly. The encryption keys are generated in hardware by a FIPS 140-2 compliant true random number generator on the IronKey cryptochip so they never leave the IronKey secure hardware. The 4GB of space should handle ALL of your PDF statements for at least a decade with spare room to keep track of other information as well.
I4U performed a full review on the PNY IronKey worth reading.
Make it a New Year’s Resolution to go through all your banking accounts, credit cards and other companies that send you paper bills and change your statements to online statements. While you’re at it, grab a copy of CutePDF so you can “print to PDF” instead of printing out your various confirmations and receipts for online transactions. If you must print out to paper, print using a duplex printer on both sides with either two or four pages on each side. If you can read four pages per side, a 200 page document can print out in 25 pages!
If you must create paper, when finished make sure you can recycle. While you should already be recycling, if you aren’t check with your waste disposal company and check to see if they have a recycling program. You can usual recycle for less than $150 a year.