The Travel Document Backup Guide

The four photographs

The bag tag one is the most-skipped and among the most useful. It is a sticker attached to your ticket at check-in, most people throw it away, and it is what a baggage desk asks for first. The full lost-bag procedure.

Where to store them

The important constraint: you may be doing this without your phone, because the phone is one of the things that gets lost or stolen. A backup that only exists on the device you lost is not a backup.

1. Email them to yourself. Reachable from any borrowed device or hotel computer with a password you know. This is the primary copy.
2. Cloud storage as a secondary, if you use it — and make sure you know the login without the phone.
3. One printed paper copy of the passport page, in a different bag from the passport. Paper works when nothing else does, and it costs nothing.
4. Give a copy to someone at home. A person who can email it to you is more reliable than any system you have to log into.

Do not store the only copy in a photo album on the phone that is in the bag with the passport. That combination is exactly one loss away from having nothing.

The written list nobody keeps

Separate from photographs, and worth ten more minutes. Some things you need are not on a document you can photograph.

• Your bank’s international phone number. The domestic freephone number does not work from abroad, which people discover at the worst moment.
• Travel insurance policy number and claims line.
• Your medication list — names and doses, not just the boxes. If a bag with medication goes missing abroad, a pharmacist needs the names. Why medication never goes in the hold.
• Accommodation address in the local language, which is a taxi problem rather than a security one and solves itself the same way.
• Two emergency contacts with country codes.

Keep this list in the same email as the photographs. One message, everything in it.

Keep the backup away from the original

The principle that makes all of this work, and the one most easily undone by a convenient product.

A folio that holds your phone, passport and cards together is genuinely convenient and it concentrates every point of failure into one object. Lose it and you have lost the documents, the money and the device holding the backup at the same moment.

Split them: passport and one card in a slim wallet on your person, second card in a different bag, phone separately, paper copy in the third place. The full splitting strategy.

Passport specifics worth knowing

• Check the expiry before you book, not before you fly. Many countries require six months of validity beyond your travel dates, and that is a rule you cannot fix at an airport.
• Check you have blank pages. Some countries require two facing blank pages for entry stamps.
• A damaged passport can be refused — water damage, a detached cover, a torn page. If yours looks marginal, replace it before the trip rather than discovering the answer at a border. What a passport cover is actually for.
• Photograph any visa as well as the data page.

The ten-minute routine

1. Photograph the passport data page and any visa.
2. Photograph both sides of every card you are taking.
3. Write the list — bank number, insurance, medication, contacts, address.
4. Email all of it to yourself in one message with a searchable subject line.
5. Print the passport page once and put it in a different bag.
6. Send a copy to someone at home.
7. At check-in, photograph the bag tag. Every leg.
8. Before closing a checked bag, photograph the packed contents.