Lighting
Without lighting perhaps 35% of your waking hours would be in the dark. Morale would be harder to maintain with little to do.
A windup LED lantern can be purchased online for about $25. Some models can also be charged via solar panel on top. I could easily read at night with the model I purchased. A windup flashlight & radio that can also be charged via solar panel costs about $17.
Emergency communications
Purchase a small radio and extra batteries so that you can receive notifications and updates. You may learn about: severe weather, distributions of food and water, a fire at a nearby nuclear power plant requiring evacuation, locations of emergency shelters, etc.
A note about batteries: Unused disposable batteries keep much longer than batteries that have been used even once. At room temperature they lose 8% to 20% of their available charge.
To protect your lights, electronics and flash drives from EMP
Use any metal container that can be tightly sealed. But the flash drives or other electronics must not be in electrical contact with the metal. So, you can use paper, plastic or cardboard as insulation to prevent electrical contact. This is one version of what’s called a “Faraday Cage.” Put in your LED wind-up light, spare smoke detectors, and emergency radio, too.
You can also store small electronics in an old broken microwave oven, as long as the door can fully close. Just as the microwave is designed to keep in microwave radiation, it will keep out EMP radiation.
If you cannot find metal containers, you can create the equivalent: Put your back-up equipment in something that doesn’t conduct electricity such as a plastic or paper bag, or a cardboard box, and then completely wrap it tightly in aluminum foil (at least two layers of thin foil.)
Batteries do not need to be stored in a Faraday Cage or in aluminum foil.