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While many of us prioritize the safety of our homes and business premises – doing our best to try and prevent intruders from getting inside – many of us don’t do enough to protect our personal, cherished and sensitive items inside our homes and businesses. While we can do our level best to upgrade our security systems, what happens if an innovative criminal equipped with all the latest gadgets and tools, does manage to get inside? Or a friend, relative or visitor to our home or business manages to get their hands on a key, or even steal from us while we’re present in the home?

If you have items in your home or business that are important to you for any reason – maybe they have sentimental value or contain sensitive data – you need to lock them away in an appropriate safe.

What is the wrong kind of safe for personal items?

It’s important to firstly note that data, media or family photos require more protection than a standard fire resistant safe can provide. Many safes are listed as fireproof, when the reality is that they are resistant to the effects of fire for a certain timeframe, not proof against it.

Items such as data and media are very sensitive to heat and humidity or moisture, and standard fire-resistant safes are not engineered to protect against such things. Paper is what fire-resistant safes are designed to protect, and they are engineered so that the internal temperature of the safe is kept below a critical 350 degrees; the kind of heat at which paper will begin to char and burn. The type of protection these safes offer is not suitable for sensitive data since it creates steam (moisture) inside, the likes of which will badly tarnish or even destroy the data.

What is the right kind of safe for personal items?

Data or media safes offer much better protection for such items, as they keep the internal temperature of the safe below 125 degrees and the humidity level at below 85%. However, since many of these safes don’t offer full protection against the risk of burglary, you might want to consider buying a smaller U.L. rated fire lock box for smaller personal items such as media and data, that can fit into a larger fire-resistant safe and will cost you less.

If your personal items are important to you, then talk to your local locksmith or safe supplier about you storage options.

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