The annual records review
Once a year, and again before every move. This is the one item on the site whose whole value is the repetition — a contemporaneous record cannot be created after the fact, however carefully you try later.
This matters MORE if you are not serving twenty years
A twenty-year retirement has a processing sequence that forces a records reckoning at the end. Separating at six years has no such forcing function: you leave with whatever you happen to hold, and find the gap years later when something worsens. The shorter the service, the more this matters — which is the opposite of how most people rank it.
The review itself
Ordered by what is hardest to reconstruct later, not by what is quickest to do now.
- RecordsEvery year
Download your own copy of your medical record
Pull the full record, not a summary, and store it yourself. Repeat annually so each year's copy exists even if a later migration drops it.
Why: Records move between systems and custodians across a career, and material is lost in those transitions. The copy you hold is the one whose custody you control.
Where: MHS GENESIS Patient Portal with a DS Logon. Where the portal will not produce the full record, SF 180 is the formal route.
- RecordsEvery year
Log every encounter, including the ones that seemed minor
Date, provider, what you reported, and what was done. A visit you shrugged off is the entry that later establishes when something began.
Why: Service connection turns on a documented in-service event or onset. An undocumented complaint is one you will be asked to prove from memory, years afterwards.
- DeadlineEvery year
Collect buddy statements while the people are still findable
For anything not fully captured in the record, get a signed, dated statement from someone who was there. Record their contact details separately.
Why: Corroboration has a shorter shelf life than the record itself. Units reorganise and people separate; a witness you can reach this year may be unreachable in ten.
- HealthcareEvery year
Record exposures and the conditions of the job
Deployments and dates, hazardous materials, noise, fuels, burn pits, radiation, repeated physical loading. Note the job, not just the incident.
Why: Presumptive lists change over time, and a condition that is not presumptive today may become so. What you cannot add later is where you were and what you were around.
- RecordsWhen it happens
Capture the paperwork from anything that generated paperwork
Mishap reports, vehicle accident reports and witness statements, line-of-duty determinations, police reports, insurance correspondence. Ask for your copy at the time.
Why: Safety and accident reports are filed in channels separate from your medical record. Nobody files them into your claim for you, and they are far harder to retrieve once the reporting chain has moved on.
- RecordsWhen it happens
Note field work, exercises and non-routine duty as it happens
A dated line per event is enough: what the duty was, where, and anything physical or environmental about it worth remembering.
Why: The cumulative conditions of a career rarely appear in any single document. A contemporaneous log written by you is admissible context that cannot be created retrospectively with the same weight.
- DeadlineEvery move
Sweep your records before every move
Request and download everything held at the losing installation before you clear. Confirm what transfers and what does not.
Why: A move is the single most likely point for a record to be lost, and the losing clinic is far easier to deal with while you are still standing in front of it.
- RecordsEvery year
Check that identifiers on every document actually match
Name, DoD ID, dates and unit. Correct mismatches while the issuing office still exists.
Why: A record filed under a wrong identifier is functionally a lost record. It is a five-minute fix now and an administrative project later.
The paperwork to ask for
Naming the form exactly is most of the work of retrieving it. "The safety form" is not something a records office can look up.
SF 91 — Motor Vehicle Accident (Crash) Report
All — Standard Form · An accident involving a government-owned or leased vehicle.
Establishes the date, place and circumstances of a crash. A back or neck condition claimed a decade later needs the event on paper, and memory of a date is not evidence.
SF 94 — Statement of Witness
All — Standard Form · Accompanies an SF 91. One per witness.
Independent corroboration collected while the witnesses are present and identifiable. This is the hardest evidence to reconstruct later, because people move and units disband.
AF Form 978 — Supervisor's Mishap Report
Air Force / Space Force · A reportable mishap involving you, filed by your supervisor.
The contemporaneous account of what happened, written by someone other than you. Ask for a copy at the time — it is filed in a safety channel, not in your medical record.
DA Form 285 / DA Form 285-AB — Technical Report of US Army Ground Accident / Abbreviated Ground Accident Report
Army · A reportable Army ground accident. Which of the two depends on severity.
Same role as the Air Force mishap report: an official record of the event that exists outside your medical file.
SF 180 — Request Pertaining to Military Records
All — Standard Form · Requesting a complete copy of a military or health record.
The formal route to a full record when a portal will not produce one. Slower than a download, and the route that works when the portal does not.
Confirm these before you ask for them
Form numbers are service-specific, get superseded, and are widely misremembered. A confident wrong number is one nobody thinks to question, so these are listed with what is uncertain about them rather than stated as fact.
Navy / Marine Corps mishap report — Reported under OPNAVINST 3750.6 (aviation) or the ground and afloat mishap instruction
Navy / Marine Corps
The Navy and Marine Corps route mishap reporting through instructions rather than a single widely-known form number.
The exact form and current instruction revision could not be confirmed to a primary source. Ask your safety officer for the report number covering your mishap, and request a copy for your own file.
AF Form 55 — Employee Safety and Health Record
Air Force / Space Force
This is an EXPOSURE and TRAINING record, not an incident report — and that distinction is why it is easy to overlook. It can evidence what hazards a job involved, which is the harder half of a claim for a condition caused by the work rather than by one identifiable event.
Sources describe AF Form 55 as an occupational safety and health record maintained primarily for civilian employees. Whether one exists for you depends on your role and your installation. Ask your unit safety representative what occupational health record covers your duties, rather than asking for a form number.
Line of Duty determination — LOD determination
All — service-specific form
A favourable line-of-duty finding is often decisive for service connection, particularly for Guard and Reserve members whose duty status on a given day is the whole question.
The form and process differ by service and by component. Confirm with your unit which applies to your status.
DD Form 2870 — Authorization for Disclosure of Medical or Dental Information
All
How you authorise release of your own records to a representative, a private provider, or yourself in a specified format.
Confirm the current form with the records office holding your file.
Where to put it all
Plain folders and PDFs, not an application's database. This archive has to be readable in thirty years by someone who may not be you, on a computer that does not exist yet.
- service-record/One archive for the whole career. Back it up in two places, one of them offline.
- 00-identity/Contracts, orders, DD 214s, DD 93, SGLI elections, promotion and grade documents.
- 01-medical/Everything clinical, filed by year so an annual download drops in without reorganising anything.
- by-year/2026/That year's full record download, dated on the day you pulled it.
- encounters/One file per visit. Date, provider, what you reported.
- imaging-and-labs/Results, and the reports that interpret them.
- profiles-and-limitations/Duty limitations, waivers, and their dates.
- 02-exposures/Deployment dates and locations, hazardous materials, noise, fuels, burn pits, radiation dosimetry.
- 03-incidents/Mishap reports, vehicle accident and witness statements, line-of-duty determinations, police and insurance paperwork.
- 04-corroboration/Signed, dated buddy statements, and a contact list kept with them.
- 05-performance/Evaluations, awards and citations, training and certifications.
- 06-claims/VA correspondence, examination notices and results, decisions, and anything you submitted.
- 07-finance/Leave and earnings statements, TSP statements, bonus and obligation contracts.
Name files so they sort themselves
YYYY-MM-DD_category_short-description.pdf
- 2026-03-14_encounter_right-knee-pain-clinic.pdf
- 2026-07-02_incident_sf91-vehicle-accident.pdf
- 2026-11-20_exposure_deployment-dates-and-location.pdf
- The date is the date the EVENT happened, not the date you filed it.
- Lower case, hyphens rather than spaces, so the name survives every operating system.
- Never rename a document you were given. Keep the original alongside your renamed copy where the original name carries meaning.
Software
This site will not name a commercial product for this, and the reason is structural. The archive holds your complete medical history and the evidence behind a future claim. There is an established industry that solicits exactly this material and charges a share of a retroactive award. A site carrying advertising that also tells you where to upload your medical records is one commercial relationship away from being part of that problem, and you would have no way to tell which recommendation was which.
Judge any tool against these
Readable in thirty years without the original software
The claim may be built long after the product you chose has been discontinued or acquired. PDFs and plain folders have outlasted every document manager built to organise them.
A copy you physically hold, not only one in someone's cloud
An account can be closed, locked or lost, and a subscription can lapse at the worst moment. The archive exists precisely because custody by someone else already failed once.
Encrypted at rest, with the key held by you
This is a complete medical history. Treat a lost laptop or a stolen drive as the expected case rather than the unlucky one.
In two places, one of them offline
Ransomware and accidental deletion both propagate to a synced copy. An offline copy is the one that survives your own mistake.
No party that takes a share of a future award
Accredited representatives are available at no cost. Any arrangement priced as a percentage of retroactive benefits deserves scrutiny before you hand over records.
Some way to tell whether a file has changed or gone missing
Silent corruption in a long-lived archive is discovered when you open the file, which is the moment you needed it.
Open options, with what each costs you
Plain folders and PDFs
The structure on this page, on a drive you own, with no application on top.
Good for: The default, and the one most people should choose. Nothing to maintain, nothing to migrate, readable by anything.
Costs you: No search inside documents, and no automatic indexing. You rely on the naming convention.
None required
Paperless-ngx
Self-hosted document management with OCR, so scanned documents become searchable text.
Good for: A large archive you need to search by content rather than by filename. Exports to plain files, so it is not a trap.
Costs you: You are now running a server, including its updates and its backups. That is a real ongoing commitment, and an unmaintained server holding medical records is worse than no server.
Open source (GPL)
Cryptomator, VeraCrypt, or your operating system's full-disk encryption
Encryption of the archive at rest, with the key held by you.
Good for: Meeting the encryption requirement without changing how you file anything.
Costs you: If you lose the key or the passphrase, the archive is gone. There is no recovery, by design. Write the passphrase down and store it the way you would store a will.
Open source
Checksums (a built-in command on every operating system)
A recorded fingerprint per file, so a later comparison shows what changed or vanished.
Good for: Detecting silent corruption in an archive that sits untouched for years.
Costs you: A manual step unless you script it. Most people will skip it, and that is a defensible choice.
Built in
Be careful of
- Anyone charging a percentage of your retroactive award. Accredited Veterans Service Officers represent claimants at no cost, and there are legal limits on who may charge for claims work at all.
- Any service asking you to upload your complete medical record before explaining what it does with it, how long it keeps it, and who else sees it.
- Free tools whose business model is not visible. If the archive is the product, the archive is the product.
- Storing the only copy in an account tied to a military or employer email address you will lose access to.
The rest of the annual sweep
The records review needs an occasion, and an occasion that exists for one purpose gets skipped. These are the other checks whose failure mode is silent — nothing tells you a beneficiary form has gone stale.
- One-way door
Re-read every beneficiary designation
SGLI, TSP, and the Record of Emergency Data. Read what they say, rather than recalling what you chose.
Why: These pass outside your will and outranks it. A designation left stale after a marriage, divorce or birth pays exactly as written.
- Money
Confirm your TSP contribution rate and where it is invested
Check the rate is still what you intended and that a pay change or a limit has not silently stopped contributions for the rest of the year.
Why: Under BRS the match is tested every pay period and is never trued up. A period under the full-match rate is a match that is gone.
- Healthcare
Verify DEERS for yourself and every dependent
Enrolment, effective dates, and that a dependent who should be enrolled actually is.
Why: DEERS drives healthcare eligibility and several benefits downstream of it. A lapse is discovered at the point of care.
- Healthcare
Complete the periodic health assessment, and keep your copy
Do it as a records event, not only as a readiness requirement: answer honestly and keep what you submitted.
Why: It is an annual, dated, official statement of your health. Understating a symptom to avoid a profile creates a record that later contradicts your claim.
- Records
Read your own personnel record end to end
Service dates, grade history, awards and decorations, training, and evaluations actually filed.
Why: Errors here feed retirement calculations and later verification. They are administrative now and evidentiary later.
- Money
Check your leave balance against the end of the fiscal year
Plan the use of leave that will otherwise be lost.
Why: Leave lost to the year-end is compensation you earned and did not receive.
- One-way door
Re-read your will, powers of attorney and advance directive
Check they still name the right people and have not expired. Installation legal assistance does this at no cost.
Why: A power of attorney a bank rejects is discovered by the person trying to use it, at the moment they need it.
- Money
Pull your credit report
Check for accounts you did not open and addresses you have not lived at.
Why: Identity misuse is both financially damaging and, for anyone holding a clearance, a security matter that is better found by you than reported to you.
This page describes how to keep records. It is not legal or medical advice and not VA claims advice. An accredited Veterans Service Officer can represent you at no cost.