All of us have items we want to protect, important documents, precious family photos, and jewelry among others. You may already have a safe in which you store these items in your home. If you do already have a safe, are you sure it will do its job? If you don’t already have safes, you will want to get one to protect these special items in the case of fire or flooding.

You might have your important documents stored in a safe deposit box. What else do you have to protect? After all, most of your photos are digital and you really don’t have other smaller items that need to be protected.

Well, consider that your digital pictures should be backed up and not just on your computer hard drive. Your digital images and files can be exceptionally important to you and backing them up may seem like your biggest concern in preventing loss of these files due to your hard drive crashing or being fried beyond recovery. However, backing up the files is only part of the solution when trying to keep your digital files safe from loss. What if there’s a fire in your home and your hard drive as well as the copies of those backed up files are both destroyed in that fire? You may be able to replace some of the documents, but there is no getting back those special family photos or the memories they represent.

Storing your backed up files in a special “Media Safe” will protect your special files from loss. Media safes are specially designed to protect digital and analog media. These safes will protect your files from not only direct exposure to fire, but also from the heat exposure that will come with a home fire.

In general, fireproof safes will protect your belongings from the direct exposure to fire. If you plan to use your fireproof safe to protect digital files or old family home movies, make sure the fireproof safe is also a media safe. These special safes can stabilize the internal temperature of the safe, even in the event of a fire, protecting your digital and analog items from melting or otherwise being damaged as a result of heat exposure while inside the safe. Waterproof safes are important not only to protect against flooding but also to keep your belonging safe during a fire, when sprinkler systems or firefighters’ hoses will drench your home to put out the fire.