I'm guessing that is under conditions of a "typical" house fire. What if the fire burns longer than two hours?

In any case, I doubt that a hard drive would survive for any length of time at 177 degrees C (350 degrees F). All the plastic bits would melt, possibly the case would warp, and you are actually perilously close to the melting point of many common solder alloys.

I think the best you could hope for would be that the platters themselves might be undamaged enough that a recovery $peciali$t might be able to save some of the data.

tanstaafl.

I thought that too, but the same would apply for DVDs and USB sticks too. One advantage of living in a newly built house is the general level of fire protection is pretty good. As it's over 3 levels the building regs state firedoors have to be fitted, which should hold back quite a bit of a blaze for a good 30 minutes.

I think this is all so in my mind I can say I took all reasonable actions. It's also nice to meet my insurance requirements for any cash etc... I hold.

Cheers

Cris

I've always found the idea of putting digital media in a fire safe bizarre. It's digital - make two copies, separate them geographically. A fire is far less likely to happen than a drive failure.

My rule of thumb - if it's not spinning in two places, it's as good as gone.

You use the drive whilst its in the safe?

Yea, that is the whole point. Like I said I'm real lazy, the drive int he safe acts as a temporary 2nd backup of the RAWs and is done automatically on import into Lightroom. Once the Wedding is edited the job is archived onto another drive to be kept offline in the safe, freeing up more space for the next job and so on.

The thing I want is to always have at least 2 copies of the RAWs and 3 (one offsite) of the JPGs.

After a couple of years I'd be happy to go down to 1 copy of the RAWs for longer term archive.

Cheers

Cris

So the drive is permanently connected? How do you get the wires in/out of the safe?

Thank you Mark

There is no hole, it's wired in with the door mech. It's the only one I could find that would allow me to do this without spending a fortune.

Cheers

Cris