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Looking for a fireproof case!

S

swingdjted

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 14, 2008
Messages
274
There are fireproof file cabinets and fireproof safes of course, but are there fireproof atx computer cases or NAS's?

A family I know just went through a terrible (complete loss) fire. It took their entire home/garage/vehicles and almost all contents. I can't imagine how they feel. They are left only with what they were wearing, their pets (escaped safely), and a few documents in a safe-deposit box at the bank. They have insurance and a supportive extended family, but when asked what they wish they could get back the most, they said their computer's storage.

I have a lot of very important (priceless) data, not only of my own, but for work, family, and friends too.

Do you guys know of any enclosures that can protect data in the event of a building fire? Can a fire safe or fire file cabinet be modded in such a way that wires can still get in and components wouldn't overheat during normal operation or during a fire?
 
IMHO, you are best off to go with something like an off site server that you can send your entire homes data too every night or whatever, in like a storage container at a warehouse.
A fire proof case would be near impossible i would bet, due to PC's needed ventilation and any good pc would need a large enough box that fireproofing all of it would be many times more expensive then the offsite backup.

Sorry about your friends.
 
Don't fireproof the case; fireproof the hard drive bays.

Get the Corsair 900D for the space, put a small fireproof safe in the case, cut out as small as possible holes for cables, put cables through, seal any holes, fab a six sided enclosure with a sealed hole for cables which also has hard drive bays mounted inside, put in hard drives, close enclosure, pour thermo-gel around enclosure inside of safe, close safe. Put in campfire with marshmellows to test.

And that is my bored genius for you.
 
Best practice is having an off site back up and/or cloud backup.

Almost all my clients have an onsite NAS and then replicate to either an offsite NAS somewhere else, a take home drive(less secure), or cloud based replication.

For time and money (depending on your space needs) best would be to do a cloud based backup of files. Even a service like Carbonite would work for you.
 
Fireproof means highly insulated. Don't DIY this - you'll just kill hardware and manage to fail at any real level of protection anyway. There are ready-made products that are built for this type of protection, and they'll be what you want in addition to off-site backups.

ioSafe is, I believe, one of the best products for this right now. Fire and water-proof with guarantees.
 
I agree that you want an off-site backup, it's about as "fire proof" as you can get. My girlfriend has an external hard drive that she takes and locks in a file cabinet in her office at work. We use TrueCrypt to lock the data down before the drive leaves the house.
 
4TB hard drives are cheap, around $160 each at the moment. Back up your precious data onto them, and put them in a safe-deposit box.

Attempting to fireproof a computer case or anything in it is, as noted above, not realistic.
 
"Fire proof" safes/cabinets aren't really fire proof, they are just insulated enough to keep the inside cool for x amount of time. A fire proof case is damn near impossible to create just from the fact that you have cables that need to run into it, and those cables will allow heat to transfer into the case almost like it wasn't fire proof.
 
Off-site storage like carbonite, blackblaze, or crashplan. That's the only practical solution.
 
The obvious answer is an external drive in a safety deposit box
 
As others said, you dont fireproof the case, you fireproof the data, either via offsite backup or ioSafe
 
darkstarcow said:
"Fire proof" safes/cabinets aren't really fire proof, they are just insulated enough to keep the inside cool for x amount of time. A fire proof case is damn near impossible to create just from the fact that you have cables that need to run into it, and those cables will allow heat to transfer into the case almost like it wasn't fire proof.
Click to expand...

But the commercially available ones are generally UL-listed and properly tested for certain time periods--unlike things such as gun safes.

Off-site is best, but we have a "fireproof" file cabinet we bought off Craig's List for fairly cheap. It's older and a little worn, but will work until I can afford something better. We keep our important paper documents in it that we aren't really going to store off-site, along with a backup set.

I agree though, creating a fire proof computer isn't really feasible. I think Iomega has a USB drive they say is fire-resistant while operational. That might be worth looking into.
 
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