Having seen a lot of good and not so good hiding places and reading about why each one is the ultimately best hiding place, I miss one thing - think before you act! That's what this instructable is about. Because there is no "best" or "worst" hiding place covering all needs.

Step 1: What to Hide?

Before looking for hiding places and ideas, you should ask yourself what you want to hide.

- Money?
- Gold, coins, rings or similar valuables?
- Paper documents, photos?
- Paintings or other big stuff?
- Data storage like USB-sticks, SD-cards?
- (Fire-)arms and ammunition?
- Your Playboy collection?
- (Spare) keys?

All of the stuff above has different needs! A spare key does not care about heat or cold, so it could easiely be hidden outside, but you do not want a gun and ammunition or a SD-card/HDD to be baked under a hot roof in the summer or get freezing cold.

Step 2: From Whom to Hide?

From whom do you want to hide your stuff? It makes a big difference whether you want to hide something ...

- (say arms, money or your Playboy collection) from your wife/kids/parents, who life with you in the same house, clean it, maintain it ond know every place in it
- from burglars who have only a limited time and no inside knowledge about the features of your place, but who may not hesitate to destroy stuff
- from the police or other officials who may legally search your place and therefore have all the time in the world (diffferent to burglars) and may also destroy things (for example false walls)
- from pickpockets if your out of your house
- from hotel personel/room service when you are travelling (they know the rooms and its hiding places better than you)

Step 3: When to Retrive?

How often and when do you want to get your stuff out of its hiding place?

- Almost never, only in very special circumstances (for example the guns you store for armageddon, the money or gold you hide for an economic crash/your retirement/...)
- Often, as you just want to hide things you need from time to time (for example spare keys for your kids or relatives, your golden rings/whatch/cufflinks when you dress up on weekends)

Do you want to use the hiding place multiple time, e.g. store things there again or can it be a one off?

- A false wall may be turned down to get what is behind, but you don't do that every day/week and rebuild it or dig a deep hole in your garden.
- It is easier and often more secret to create hiding places that you can acess only by destroying it but you can't use them again.

Is it ok if others see/know about when you take your stuff out of its hiding place or do you want that to be kept secret, too? How easy and fast must it be to get your stuff out of its hiding place? If you hide a gun to protect you from robbery, it may not be helpful iif you must dig it out of your garden ...

Step 4: What Is at Risk?

This is a quite different question from the one asked above (2.)!

- Often you do not want that valuables get taken away from you, so the risk is the loss of what you hide. But the loss of some things may be only inconvenient (for example your phone if you have a backup of all your photos and data) while the loss of others (all your savings) may be a serious threat. If you split your valuables up and hide it in a dozen hiding places in your house, chances are high that no burglar finds all of your stuff. But if your house burns down, still everything will be gone. And if you die (for example by accident) and noone else knows your hiding places (and you have not written them down - in a safe place), your kids may not benefit from what you worked very hard for ...
- If you want to hide information (for example fotos, evidences, account information, bitcoins), in particular on a SD-card, USB-Stick or HDD, you can usually make as much copies of that information as you want. In these cases you care less about the loss of one storage device but the real rist is the total loss of the information (loss of all storage devices). In adddition, the (even bigger) risk is that unauthorized people have access to the information.
- The risk can also be that whatever you hide is brought in connection with you. In particular in some unfree countries it may be illegal to have certain documents, information or things. So you may want to hide them in a way and in a place (public building, outdoors) where it is not obvious that the hidden stuff belongs to you.

Step 5: Conclusion

So before hiding stuff just because it's fun and because you found a good hiding place, you should ask yourself the questions above. Once you know what you need and what you want, you should think, check out the ideas here on instructables, think again, imagine exactly what you intend to do and what the result would be like, think once again - then you may consider starting to act ... ;-)