VCY wrote in post #16501747
I have considered renting out a safety deposit box at my local bank to store backup hard drives of archives of my raws and processed images; my bank claims that the box is fire-proof. I've yet to ask them but I am wondering about the water-proofness and earthquake-proofness of their box.
I'll be speaking to my bank about a safety deposit box today. My bank sits 30 metres above the rivers on a hill, and the deposit box room isn't in the basement. Earthquakes aren't an issue here, but I'll see if I can get a box big enough to hold a small pelican case just in case of water. They didn't even lose power during the floods.
Great idea. 
monty87 wrote in post #16501762I use crashplan. They also offer a service to transfer large amounts of data by sending you a hard drive that you can upload to and send it back to attach to your cloud storage account.
I installed this last night and checked it out. It might be a handy solution for some of my personal stuff, but the online storage options are way too costly for me for the volume of stuff I personally have.
It looks like they have some great features for U.S. costumers, so it might be a good solution for some of you.
hollis_f wrote in post #16503042Firesafe in a friend's office about 10 miles away. But that's a copy of other backups. Anything that's stored in just one place isn't a backup. Not much you could have done about the negatives, but there's no real excuse for having only one copy of digital images.
Oh, I had duplicate copies. I don't completely trust SATA drives as sometimes the plates will seize. They're cheap, so I had two or three of each. They were just all in the same place. 
And, they weren't in a Pelican Case (which probably would have saved them).
I'm a cartographer in a legal land survey firm. We're required, by the government, to store all of our documents, field books, notes, and files relating to jobs for a minimum of ten years. To put my photos in the same storage room seemed like a solid idea at the time. Hindsight being 20/20 . . . dumb, dumb, dumb.
Yes, the company lost all of our documents, field books, notes, and files.
A fire fighter friend of mine (when we were discussing ammo storage) advised me that fire proof safes can still get very, very, hot inside. While things may not burn, they can (and do) melt. Things (like ammo and even cans of soup) can also get so hot they'll explode inside them.
Have you looked at the temperature ratings of the safe in your friend's office: how hot it gets how quickly?
John from PA wrote in post #16503111All my digital images are stored on DVD, and there are two copies made. DVD's and CD's will survive flooding, especially if they are properly stored in cases.
As far a digital goes I lost around 2tb of work: RAW, jpeg, high res scans of my 35mm work, and products. It would have taken a minimum of 2996 CDs for archive copies, and another 2996 CDs for a backup copy of each. That's a minimum of 5992 CDs: providing all of the CDs were perfectly full. For DVDs, it would still take a huge number.
I had ten SATA drives. Everything (negatives included) fit into two standard file archive boxes. Had we had any idea how bad things were going to get, I easily could have tossed them into my truck when I left work. The basement didn't start to take on water until late that night.
I've got ~500GB just of RAW images since September. My volume since September has been freakishly high. I took on a volunteer position as a minor hockey photographer in September, and I don't delete anything. Ever.
I do think archival quality DVDs and CDs are probably the best idea, but they're not always a practical, or even workable, solution.
I'm thinking the safety deposit box (something I never considered before), could be part of a great solution for me.
