Before your next trip: the 15-minute document backup that prevents a ruined holiday

Picture the scenario. The bag is gone. It happens in the time it takes to look up at a departure board: pickpocketed on the metro, left on a bus, checked luggage rerouted to a city you've already left. The bag itself is painful — the clothes, the chargers, the camera. But the bag is replaceable. The documents inside it are the problem. Without backup copies of anything, you're spending day two of your holiday at an embassy, and your bank card doesn't work because you can't verify your identity to unblock it, and you can't prove who you are to the hotel because your passport is gone too.

That's the scenario this prevents. Fifteen minutes, the week before you leave.

This isn't about probability — it's about asymmetry

The probability of losing a bag abroad is low. It happens, but it's not common. The reason to do this anyway is the asymmetry: the backup takes fifteen minutes. The alternative — replacing a passport through an embassy, dealing with a frozen card when you can't prove who you are, calling your bank in English from a cafe in a language you don't speak — takes two or three days and several hundred dollars in unplanned expenses, plus a holiday that's effectively over. Fifteen minutes now against three days of a foreign city's bureaucracy. There is no version of that calculation where you skip the backup.

What to scan before you leave

Your passport. Not just the photo page. Any visa pages, entry stamps from ongoing multi-entry visas, and any endorsement pages relevant to your destination. If someone checks your documents at a border or police station and you have a multi-entry visa, you need the full picture — not just a photo of your face.

The visa itself, if it's a sticker in the passport or a separate document. Some countries issue visas as standalone papers. Scan those separately.

Your driver's licence. At every hotel check-in and every car hire desk, they'll ask for secondary ID after the passport. A scan of your licence is the fastest way to establish who you are when you need a second form of ID and don't have the physical card.

Your travel insurance policy. The most important thing here is not the full policy wording — it's two pieces of information: the policy number and the 24-hour emergency helpline number. Screenshotting those two things is fine. The policy number is what they'll ask for when you call. The helpline number is what you need to find at midnight when something has gone wrong and you're not sure what's covered.

Your health insurance card, both sides. Your domestic card, front and back — the front has the policy number, the back has the helpline. If you've taken out separate travel health insurance (which you should), that card too. Some hospitals abroad will want to see physical or digital proof of insurance before they start treating you.

Vaccination certificates, if your destination requires proof of vaccination on entry or at specific venues. The requirement changes by country and by season. Check before you travel, and if it's required, have it accessible without a data connection.

Your credit and debit cards — front and back of each card you're travelling with. The back of the card has the international helpline number for lost and stolen cards. When you call to cancel a stolen card from abroad, the operator will ask you to verify account details. Having a scan means you can confirm the card number and expiry from memory — not from the physical card you no longer have. This speeds up the cancellation and often matters for getting an emergency replacement card arranged.

Your prescription list. Not for customs — most countries don't require documentation for a standard supply of prescription medication in personal luggage. The reason to have it is pharmacies. If you run out of medication abroad, or your medication is lost with the bag, a pharmacist will ask you for the generic (non-brand) name of the medication, your prescribing doctor's name, and often a photo of the original label. A simple list — medication name, generic name, dose, prescribing doctor — gets you through that conversation without starting from scratch.

Don't forget your trip documents

Scan or save your flight booking reference, hotel confirmation, and any transfer or rail bookings. The scenario that actually comes up is this: your phone dies at the airport and you need to show a confirmation at check-in. Airlines and hotels can look up bookings by PNR code — the six-character alphanumeric reference on your booking confirmation. But they need the code. Write it somewhere that doesn't require a charged phone and a working app to access. The back of the paper checklist works. A screenshot in your camera roll works, as long as you've checked that the camera roll is accessible offline.

What to do with the scans

Three options, in rough order of how seriously you want to take it.

Email them to yourself. Reliable, zero setup, every email client stores attachments for offline access if you've opened them before. The downsides are organisation and privacy: your documents sit in your email inbox next to everything else, and your email provider has them on a server. Acceptable for many people. Not everyone's preference.

A secure folder in Files or Drive, synced for offline access. iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox — all of these let you mark folders for offline access before you travel. The key step is to do that sync while you still have a reliable connection, not at the airport. Check that the files open without a data connection before you leave. If you need to log in to access them, they're not truly offline.

A dedicated app that keeps things private and accessible without a server. That's what filedup is for — a private document organiser for iPhone that keeps everything on your device, never uploaded, never indexed. If you want to know when it's available, join the waitlist.

Whatever system you use, run the same test before every trip: put your phone in airplane mode and try to open each document. If you can't open it without a data connection, you don't have a backup — you have a file that might be accessible if everything else is working. The point of the backup is precisely that everything else is not working.

What not to carry together

Your physical identity documents should never all travel in the same bag. Passport in your carry-on, on your person. A second form of ID — driver's licence, or a photocopy of the passport — in a separate location. If you use a travel document wallet, put only copies in it; the originals stay separated from it. The scenario you're designing against is not just bag theft — it's the one where the entire bag goes and you're left with whatever is in your pockets and on your body.

The emergency contact list

Before you leave, write down — on paper, or in a screenshot you've confirmed opens offline — four numbers. Your nearest embassy or high commission at the destination. Your travel insurer's 24-hour emergency helpline. The international lost-card helpline for your primary credit card. One person at home who will pick up the phone at any hour and who knows where your documents are kept.

These four numbers are the most important things on this list, and they're the ones people most reliably forget to write down. They're also the ones you will want immediately, without unlocking an app, if the bad scenario actually happens.

The worst-case travel scenario — lost passport, frozen card, foreign city, no data — is recoverable when you have backups. It's expensive and it takes a day or two, but it's manageable. Without backups, it tends to compound: you can't prove who you are to the bank because you have no ID, you can't get emergency cash because you can't verify the account, you can't get a hotel room without a card, and the embassy won't fast-track a replacement passport without documentation. Each problem makes the next one harder.

Fifteen minutes, the week before. Run the checklist.