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5 mins to leave your house.. what do you do?

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I worry about the gas stoves in my apartment building. The pilot on mine has blown out a couple of times. I'd grab my hard drives, document case, wallet, car keys, and camera backpack.

I suppose I could throw some clothes out the window too.
 
Get dressed, grab purse, phone, tablet notebook, backpack, pills, dog leash, dog, keys, cap, roommate. If the place will be destroyed for sure (incoming natural disaster sure to destroy home and all in it somehow) I would also gnab my mini fileserver and desktop PC case only. Everything else not already in the car can be replaced without too much trouble except the home itself and my fish which no way can I get them out in that time. (I have some small but long lived fish I've become quite attached to in a 90 gallon aquarium)
 
Get dressed, grab purse, phone, tablet notebook, backpack, pills, dog leash, dog, keys, cap, roommate. If the place will be destroyed for sure (incoming natural disaster sure to destroy home and all in it somehow) I would also gnab my mini fileserver and desktop PC case only. Everything else not already in the car can be replaced without too much trouble except the home itself and my fish which no way can I get them out in that time. (I have some small but long lived fish I've become quite attached to in a 90 gallon aquarium)
You will be missed.🙁
 
phone/wallet/keys are always top priority and then I grab a backpack for whatever I can grab from the safe/desk drawer which has my external HDD. Oh and SLR camera bag too since it's easy to grab.
 
crap, I'll have to find a screwdriver somewhere and open up my PCs to take the hard drives out...
 
I have a post office safety deposit box I occasionally bring offsite backups too, I should really do it more often though, been a while since the last time I did it. 😛

If I had 5 minutes to leave I'd get the cat in her kennel, throw in a bucket of food (small ice cream bucket I use to fill her bowl). I'd also try to grab my credit card, debit card and some cash on the way out as I don't know how long it will be till I can go back in. I'd make extra sure the alarm system is on and the door is locked and hope for the best. Given more time I'd go unrack my server but depending on where I'm going and if I can use my car it would perhaps be too much to haul that around. I'd have to depend on my offsite backups that are older. My most important stuff like code does get backed up to my internet server on a weekly basis though.

I'm glad I don't live in an apartment though, as some people tend to care less about fire safety in apartments because it's not their own building. I don't want to live in a place where all my stuff is dependent on the GAF index of multiple people when it comes to the building's safety.

In a situation where I know my house is doomed anyway, and that there will probably be looters, I'd go pull out a couple drives from my raid array to break it, and keep those drives with me so even if someone does loot they wont get any data.
 
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thanks all for the 'interesting" comments, i'm going to get my shit together, get a filing cabinet to start and get all my papers and crap out of envelopes stuffed in drawers and shit and organize it all. perhaps i'll open a safety deposit box as well.
 
If we are talking about a full 5 minutes (300 seconds), like by a stopwatch, I could load our van with a lot more stuff than we really need.

The important things would be:

-The wife, kids and dogs (the damn fish is on his own);
-Keys, wallets and phones;
-Multiple external drives (they are also backed up offsite, but I have 5 whole minutes!);
-Photo albums (the pictures are backed up, but the wife spent a lot of time putting the books together);
-Our Mac Minis and laptops;
-Wedding album.

I am not sure what else would be important enough to go back in for (I have a lot of emergency kit items in the van and car, too). Also, since we are assuming a local fire, we can just go to my sister-in-laws or mother-in-laws to sleep and to stores to restock things like clothes and toiletries.

MotionMan
 
if it's anything like when that 4.5 EQ shook my place a year ago (epicenter was a few hundred yards away...so that shit was crazy), I will probably just run around in circles with no idea what to do.

so yeah, I'm toast.

But if I do manage to think clearly, I'll just leave. everything can burn. starting over would be quite refreshing, now that I think about it (no--no wife, no kids, none of that to worry about. ....not the kind of starting over I am talking about)
 
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