by James Strong

Created on: July 04, 2007   Last Updated: July 04, 2011

You and your family take a cruise to the Bahamas. The cruise ship docks and you head for a resort where you lay on warm sand and swim in blue crystal water where fish are as fresh as the sky is clear. You rest on a hammock in the shade of a palm tree as a breeze cools your skin. You dose off in a dreamy moment. But, then, you wake up to find your purse or wallet missing.

In it you kept some cash, a credit card and a few other important items. But you're not worried, because you put your passport, visa, driver's license and other travel documents in the resort's safe deposit box. They are secure, so you don't scream or rush to file a police report.

Later, on your walk back to the resort's main building, you hear sirens and see police cars at the main entrance. You become nervous and your worst fear comes true: Someone robbed the resort's safe deposit boxes, stealing the rest of your cash, valuables and travel documents.

Still you aren't ready to panic, because you took the precaution of leaving copies of your valuables and travel documents in the cruise ship's safe deposit box. You call the ship only to find out a boiler blew up, sinking the ship in 30 minutes.

Now you are perturbed, though not agitated. You call home and ask your parents to fax copies of your travel documents to the resort. But they have bad news. Your house burned down a few hours before you called. Everything in it was destroyed.

By now you wonder whether you have been cursed by a mummy from ancient Egypt. But you have one more ace up your sleeve. You kept backup copies of your travel documents in your home bank's vault. You call the bank, and the bank manager tells you a teller went nuts and burned all the documents in the vault.

Certainly, this scenario seems far fetched. But even the most unforeseen disasters can occur when traveling to adventurous spots in a foreign land. Your travel documents are so important that you should foresee all possibilities of losing them and take precautions.

So given this scenario, is there another safe place to store your travel documents?

You bet there is. You can store your documents in an online safe deposit box. An online safe deposit box is a file, database or server where scanned images of documents are stored online for easy download from a website or retrieval from an email account. It's a different concept that may someday replace storage of paper travel documents in a physical location.

So what are some advantages of storing your travel documents

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