Fire Resistant Safes

Storing Documents and Computer Data in Fire Safes
When it comes to protecting your business from disaster it's important to consider your plan for retrieving your business data and important paperwork in the event of a fire or flood situation. Backing up your computer data is necessary to protect against loss from computer or server crash, but a fire resistant safe is vital to recovering that data as a best business practice.

Which Fire Safe is Right for your Business?
While there are many manufacturers of fire resistant safes the most important considerations are the fire rating, size, and weight. Paper documents begin to char in a fire at a touch over 400 degrees F. This means that your fire safe for business documents needs to have a UL 350 rating / classification. The safe is tested to ensure the interior temperature does not exceed 350 degrees - thus keeping your documents safe and secure even while a reaches up to 1700 degrees F.

Removable computer media / data is more fragile than paper and should be stored in a safe that maintains a UL 125 fire rating. This means the interior temperature will not exceed 125 degrees F so that the removable media can be used to recover the data. These fire ratings apply to floppy disks, DLT tapes, LTO tapes, etc.

It's important to note that fire ratings for computer media were established in the 1980's and there are no standards set for hard drives or removable hard drives. Independent fire tests from the Western Fire Center have proven that data recovery from hard drives subjected to 1700 degree fires for 1-hour are possible with internal temperatures reaching 200 degrees F. ioSafe disaster proof hardware is an example of this type of testing with 100% data recovery in all fire tests. Perhaps UL should come up with some new standards in the age of digital data??

Sizes and Storage Capacity
If you are shelling out thousands of dollars for a fire resistant safe make sure you buy one that gives you room for growth!! You don't want to get a new safe and find out that you have maxxed out the storage capacity in a month!

Weight
Fire safes are heavy! With that being said, make sure that the floor of your building can support the weight - all buildings have load-bearing capacities and when considering the right safe for your needs it's of utmost importance that you know the weight limit of your upper floors. You don't want to have to pay the return freight charges or worse yet have your fire safe fall through the floor!

World Renowned Brands
Both Schwab Corp safes and FireKing safes are synonymous with security and reliability as well as great delivery and customer service. When you are protecting thousands if not tens-of-thousands of dollars worth of documents or data always go with the best fire resistant safes on the market.