Because as David noted, it takes a media safe to keep the temperature
within a safe limit ( no pun intended ). Fire safes are designed to
protect paper not electronic media. Inexpensive ones are likely not
to be water tight so electronic things inside such as disk drives,
will likely be subject to wet conditions.
Keeping CDs in ziplock bags is a good idea in general if temperature
is not an issue. They will need to be inside one of those crystal
cases that keep anything from touching the data surface, not loose
inside the bag nor in one of those flexible envelopes that are
supposed to be CD safe ( I ruined a whole set of CDs for which I
didn't have any other backup copy last year storing them that
way. The enclosure had a chemical reaction that etched the CD
surface over about 25% of the disk area. I was extremely fortunate
to be able to polish the surface enough to be able to get one good
read and recover the data - now there's three backups for them on
hard drives and another set on CD.
For really valuable cameras, you should think about Pelican
cases. They are fiber glass and have water tight seals that are also
air tight - just thing for environmental hazards like hurricane
damage and lots of water falling everywhere <grin>
see: http://www.casesbypelican.com/pelican_Camera_cases.htm
There must be other vendors out there that offer similar cases.
For the truly paranoid among us about backup and reliability, there
is RAID technology that can deal with all sorts of error conditions.
Nice article on this is in Wikipedia at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks#RAID_1
I'm not quite that fearful but it does seem to answer a lot of backup
questions concerning data error and loss local to the computer. (But
you still need off site, etc.).
Cheers,
James
At 04:59 PM 12/14/2006 -0500, you wrote:
Why not keep the CDs in Ziploc freezer bags (double-bagged?) in a fire-safe?
Here in the Hurricane Belt, I have often used these bags for my cameras and
lenses.
Darin Heinz
Melbourne, Florida USA
James Schenken
