After reading about the recovery of the Air France 330 that crashed into the Atlantic last year losing all aboard, I somehow made the jump to the need for a Personal Black Box for all our personal and important data... images, documents, videos etc.
So what would a personal black-box achieve? It would be fire proof, waterproof... recoverable after an earthquake, flood or fire. It would be easy to access. It would have a wired and wireless connection capability with its own security. Namely data could be sent one way with one password and require another password to be accessed.
It would have a heartbeat system that raised the alarm if it lost power or was damaged in any way (for example if the hard drive detected damage to itself). A service would try to connect with the black-box at regular intervals and if unsuccessful send a series of alerts on an escalating schedule... It would try to contact you for a couple of days, then a second designee or a third or a fourth until it found someone to confirm that they will follow up to retrieve the device. For example the heartbeat service could initially try to contact you via email, then via SMS, then your spouse, then your Dad or your brother or sister gradually raising the alarm as it takes longer to find someone to contact.
The system could also include a secondary or tertiary drive or even an optical disk backup and writing system. It would have a battery to survive blackouts and possibly even a 3G pinging service capability to make contact itself in an emergency.
What about the Software?
Ideally, via a government certification process owners should be able to be given permanent access license keys to all the software and media they own. You should be able to have backups of all the media you own and have access to that media and software no matter where you decide to live in the world.
Photos/ scans of every important document, all your passwords and usernames and all your cherished movies, videos and photos should be safely stored inside.
