You in a place with a staffed fire company? Because 100' is not at all far for an "exposure" fire - a second fire started by the main fire. We often get outbuildings involved when the main house goes up (and vice versa) especially if it's windy.

Most of my pictures are not important as I’m not a big picture person. I have less then 50 that I consider important enough to back up. I have several hundred megs of Word and MS Access files (my business files and hobby files) that I have copies of. Nothing earth shakingly (sp?) important.

I keep the house copy of 2 CDs in one of my gun safes (I only have just over 800 Megs of things I need backed up and not all that is really important), it said it was fire resistant when I bought the safe in the mid 1980s. I don’t know how resistant it is as it’s old and I can’t remember for how long it will take the heat. The fire resistant (one is resistant, one is not) gun safe is right behind me, its 5-feet from the computer so it’s easy to put the CDs in it on the shelve. The copy in the garage is just in a plastic Tupperware case so yes it could burn. With the house and the garage I feel somewhat safe from data loss. It’s just computer files, not life & death things.


I would guess that most people don’t backup any computer data. I make my own computers (buy the parts and put them together myself) and always have friends & family call me to look at them when things go wrong with their computers. No one I know backups data.

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The fire department here is fairly good, my dad was a fireman for 41-years. My brother is a fireman (just got a 20-year pin a few weeks ago) I have seen a lot of burned out homes over the years. I have fire extinguishers on each floor. I also have smoke alarms through the house. My dad would smack me if I did not have them.

I treat fire seriously, if you look at this picture of the Thermette I use to heat water while camping, you will see a collapsible yellow water bucket. It’s full of water just incase the fire were to start to get out of hand. I use it all the time for this when I go camping and have any fire.