On 12/14/06, James Schenken <jds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The one in the safe should be considered protected from water and / or storm damage but not from fire damage. Most safes available to ordinary folks are fire rated to protect paper. So if the interior only gets up to 350 degrees F., the contents are considered safe. I doubt that any computer storage media would be completely intact after sitting for an hour or so at 350 deg. certainly no CD or DVD would survive that. Offsite protects against fire.
You can get "media-rated" safes; they get to 125 degrees and there's also a humidity limit. It's a UL rating, probably means *something* anyway. I wouldn't consider most safes I've inspected safe from water damage; they're not water-tight (ordinary, not media). A fire-safe had better be water-tight, since spraying water around is a normal part of a fire, but I must say that looking at them, they don't look convincing. I'd want to research this rather more carefully before really counting on any of these; right now the safes I use are "bonus", not the basic protection I'm counting on. As you say, far-enough separated offsite protects against *lots* of things; fire, earthquake, flood, mud-slide, hurricane, tornado. Offsite is the magic trick for digital preservation. Ever done a bit-for-bit verify after copying 500GB from hard drive to hard drive? I've found an amazing number of errors in copying over the years. Those drives are only good for 10^14 bit operations without an undetected error -- you can get up to that many bits in normal operations at today's disk sizes. My not-yet-in-production file server uses the ZFS filesystem, which holds a checksum on each block of data (variable block size, often large), so it will detect hardware errors earlier, hopefully while the mirror or parity copy is still good, or while one of my off-line optical media is still good. -- David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:dd-b@xxxxxxxx>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/> RKBA: <http://www.dd-b.net/carry/> Pics: <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/> Dragaera/Steven Brust: <http://dragaera.info/>
