Ask Lemmy

Important documents and hard drives with photos are in a fire- and water-proof safe. It's also just easier to find them since we never move it anywhere so passports and certs are all in there.

My sister inherited my dad's big fireproof gun safes and things like birth certificates are in there (at this point maybe they should be on our person).

I don't use either, I have a small plastic folder for kinda important documents but tbh I can't really think of any documents I would actually need that are not fairly easy to get replaced.

I have all my important documents in a fire rated safe mostly because whenever I need to get one of them I remember "oh yeah I put that in my safe". I don't own anything valuable that could fit in the safe. As someone who works on safes though I would recommend anyone who wants one for burglary protection to bolt it down if possible and don't show anyone you have it. I've seen the aftermath people's 200+ pound safes dragged through the house and out the door. Also if you own guns and have kids I would absolutely recommend a safe to put them in. Check your local laws as well because here in California starting in 2026 gun owners can be charged if they don't have their guns locked securely and someone in their household who should not have access to guns gets access to their guns.

Single person, living alone in a 1 bedroom apartment. Even I have a small fire safe.

I've considered a safe, but I've heard the paper contents may mold if left in there too long. Currently too lazy to manage that.

Banks have made it really difficult to rent safety deposit boxes lately. It used to be a common account benefit but I can't find any within a reasonable distance of me since 2023, and none which are included as an account benefit. A fireproof safe is good enough and the types of documents I put in it aren't truly irreplaceable anyways, just really hard/annoying to replace. I doubt many people use their fireproof safe for truly valuable items that would be attractive to thieves. My fireproof safe doesn't even have a proper lock.

I know my parents used to have a filing cabinet for all our important stuff when I was growing up, but now we don't have much of anything keeping them safe. I wouldn't mind having something like a lockable filing cabinet, but I don't have enough important stuff to put in it, nor enough space in my room.

Well, I do I have tucked into a random bookshelf one of those "World Atlas" book safes that everyone already knows is a storage box and not a book, because they've been sold virtually unchanged as far as I can tell since at least the early 1990s. As a little treat to anyone observant who notices this and thinks they're so damn clever, inside I have nothing but a scaled down 3D printed replica of a cinder block.

It is astoundingly unlikely anyone will find where my valuables are actually hidden in my house, nor am I going to admit it on the internet.

Keep in mind that many "fireproof" safes misrepresent their capabilities and the fireproofing itself can severely damage or destroy safe contents in a fire.

Tl;dr: the contents slow cook and soak in a mixture of water and whatever else was present for hours to days. Depending on the severity and duration of the fire, plastics will melt, metals will tarnish, and unprotected paper, wood, and similar contents will be destroyed.

Most more affordable safes are fireproofed via a layer of drywall material. Drywall is composed of gypsum, otherwise known as calcium sulfate dihydrate: CaSO~4~·2H~2~O .

The fireproofing doesn't come from any direct insulating properties but the hydration of the gypsum. When exposed to enough heat, the water bound to calcium sulfate begins to unbind and boil out. The interior of the safe will remain at 100°C or less as the external heat energy from the fire is absorbed by this dehydration/phase change process, releasing water as steam.

This turns your safe into a big steamer/(low) pressure cooker. The safe boils during the fire, then sits and "cooks" for hours afterwards as the area cools down. The safe keypad will be inoperative, so you'll be reliant on the backup key working. If that mechanism is damaged, the manufacturer or a locksmith will need to open it. No matter what, the contents will remain in a hot, damp environment for hours to days.

Gun safe. Water proof, fire proof and locked. 200 lbs won't be walking out so easily.

I have a home safe that doesn’t lock properly. To replace it would cost me everything that I’d put in a home safe.

We have a fireproof / waterproof safe box we store documents like that in (essentially this). It's not going to keep an intruder from getting the documents if they wanted to (they could just take the box with them and smash it open, it's certainly not good as an anti-theft device) but it's waterproof and fireproof and that's more what we were concerned with.

It's worth noting that these aren't rated to protect documents from a prolonged intense fire; if your house burns to the ground, it's probably not going to help.

Nice try, Danny Ocean.

My mom bought me a fireproof safe because she was giving me some jewelry to hold for my kids, and she also had some documents for me to keep.

It sat on the floor under a bed for years. Then I decided to get appraisals of the jewelry to add it to my homeowners insurance.

When I opened the safe, everything in it was moist and moldy.

Nothing important was lost or damaged, but it was nasty as hell.

Most of my legal documents can be reproduced easily or they are in a folder I can take with me. Apart from that I don't own anything of value.

I'm not a very legal person, but I can't think of any documents that I can't just request a copy.

If my apartment were to burn down I would have bigger problems to worry about, like homelessness and losing all my tech that took me years to aquire.

I just moved into a place with a (gun?) safe I don't know how to open. So technically I have one.