Paul,
Depends were you're at. I guess you have some "Rolls Royce" brands close to you. I'd never cosidern any "cheap" stuff for this.
The ones available here can withstand fire for 120 minutes and guarantee that the temp. does not go above 55 deg. C (or something like that). Don't take a safe that is proofed for doucments! They usually have the limit set to some 175 deg. C. Media is much more easy to destroy. It must say MEDIA on the safe. The "Rolls" brands also have automatic locking of the door and other fancy stuff that could be valuable.
I think that smallest starts about 2-3 kUSD and upwards depending on how big you want it (and heavy...). As usual, there is no upper limit...
They sure know to charge for these - they know the value of information. If you have very long projects (and expensive ones) I'd get one.
Another method is to rent space at your trust neighbours garage... Unless the entire block burns down it would give you some fire proof... :)

What's your budget, you'll be paying quite a bit for any safes with over a 2 hour fire rating.
Sentry makes some affordable models with quite accurate ratings. Would you say 2 hours ETL + waterproof (for dig. media) is long enough for you?

I can spend some money on this, knowing that it is not a good item to be skimpy on. And thanks for your inputs. So which brand would you recommend jaydeeee? Sentry then? Any particular model to avoid besides the ones for documents, before I go there?

Paul

I don't know much about fireproof safes, but I do know this....

10-15 years ago I bought a small (18"-ish cube") safe at Builders Emporium, around $100-150, I think, to store photo equipment in. I drilled holes through the bottom so I could bolt it into the floor. (I lost my prior small equipment safe, filled with still photo gear, that wasn't bolted down to a burglar who wheeled it out of the house and down the sidewalk balanced on a roller skate - true story).

Anyway, turns out these cheap "fire resistant (or whatever) safes have the space between the walls stuffed with some damp material. I had silica gel cannisters in the thing, and I would have to remove and dry them out every couple of days, the humidity in the thing was so high. Really useless for storing photo gear (breeding ground for lens fungus for a start), and I wouldn't thing it would be great for storing hard drives in either.

But again, these are the cheap couple hundred buck models I'm talking about (plus drilling through the safe wall didn't help any!)

Budget dependent:
2hr, lower cost, small - http://www.totalsecuritystore.com/product.jsp?sku=SENT047

FireKing might fit your bill based on your reply, but I would inquire about what models are both fire and water proof. Delivery is a factor too.

http://www.klsecurity.com/fireking_safe/3-hour-best-fireproof-data-safe.htm

or http://www.kcsafe.com/items/media-safes/fireking-media-safes/fireking-3-hour-media-safes/list.htm

Good luck

I started checking safes out based on your info and ended up looking at FireKings; you weren't kidding about them being pricey. There's a huge difference between 1hr and 2hr safe. I need mostly storage space for at least three 500 gig external drives (My Book) so that puts me into the $ 1.500 range just at first glance. I'll check out your links now and thanks again.

Well, it turns out that I would need to pay upwards of $ 2,000 to get the right one. I hate to say this but that's more than I had in mind when I said I don't mind paying. Now I say I don't mind trips to my safe deposit box in my bank so much anymore. What a concept!

Don't rule out the Safe Deposit boxes though. They're a great alternative. I've got back up documents both hard copied and on HD along with photos in ours. I do have a fire-rated safe as well but I'm more worried about the safe getting hauled off as opposed a a fire anyway.

There is a guy down the street from me who has a HUGE walk-in fire-rated stuff he stores everything in. Door in front of the electronic keyed door is a faux sarcophogus lid. Pretty sweet.

As Paul has implied you have to be careful and understand that fireproof doesn't always mean fireproof. Check to see how long the fire proof rating is for and what it is for. If you have pix backed up on DVD's they can easily melt in a fire proof safe when papers won't ignite, etc.

Just a little FYI to filter through the advertising on the front of the box.

Well, there's document safes and data safes (and other types as well. He should look into the data safes (though they're not cheap).
I think a deposit box is great idea if it's large enough for his stuff, gotta weigh the cost of renting one vs. buying a good data safe.

The way I have the cost of renting or owning figured out is that I need such a volume of safe backups only due to the magnitude of my current project, a feature film, which comes up, well, so far once in 70 years. All the previous years I could carry my current projects in my pocket wherever I went; I could even back these jobs up on my FTP and did that too. I have just about a year and half more to go on this film, after which I can't imagine having a need for a fireproof safe at home in the foreseeable future.

I initially thought these safes ranged in the hundreds of dollars, which I figured might be worth the price of not having to go to the bank and back every week or two. But considering the savings of 3 thousand dollars and the trouble involved with bolting the thing to the floor, the space it would occupy... it seems OK to stay with the bank now.

Now if I had thought of this 20 years ago....

You can't beat having data in 2 or more places. And I would go to a second location more often than once every two weeks.

If you have $20,000 invested so far in one project, can you afford to reshoot everything, or more specifically, what amount is your cutoff for peace of mind?

Rent 1 sqm in your neighbours garage? ;)

I'd go with a good safe and then sell it when you retire to Key West or whatever. It will not be worthless and you usually write the safe off in 3 years and they it's your money, 100% - which brings the economics into it's right place. ;)

I am an animator and my source files are created in Mirage, where I draw on a Wacom tablet. There are no cameras or raw footage involved in our line of work; not even drawings on paper anymore. We do all our drawing and painting in Mirage with a Wacom tablet, paperlessly.

All ninety minutes of our film (my crew is just my wife, a sound man/composer and I) at its source will fit into a single IOmega pocket drive. The large external drives which we keep in a vault at the bank hold our 1080p uncompressed files rendered out of Mirage. My Vegas files I keep also in my pocket drives. When our house burns down together with the bank, we can go back to work the next day in a hotel room after we have bought two laptop computers and two Wacom tablets.

Keeping the rendered, uncompressed finished scenes on external drives is essentially a second backup of the backup source files in my pocket Iomega drive. Besides these two places we have all files backed up in two places at home -- in case of computer failure.

We work at home, which we seldom leave but always carry the Iomega drive when we go out, we have three dogs and live in a pretty safe neighborhood. Our producers have their film covered by a major insurance policy including a policy on my life.

So the loss of what is stored on those large external drives in the bank would represent a loss of time needed to rerender them from Mirage -- it would not be the equivalent of losing raw film or tape footage.

Then you sir are probably better off than 80% of the rest of us in securing/backing up our systems/processes. You can't get any better than this:

"we can go back to work the next day in a hotel room after we have bought two laptop computers and two Wacom tablets"