Reading the thread Fire Safes with Electronic Locks got me thinking not about the locks but about what fire safe means. So I launched this thread to keep from hijacking chaosmagnet's thread.

A few years ago a friend's house burned to the ground. His 40-gun safe was in the center of the home. The home collapsed into the crawl space. Five days later the backhoe got to the safe. It was still hot to the touch.

Everyone was curious about how the contents fared. It took more than a few whacks with a splitting maul to get it open. Apparently it was a good secure design.

Turns out that a 12-hour safe will not protect the contents in this situation. Lack of oxygen kept everything from burning, but the contents were toast. The guns were charcoal, the coins lumps of gold, the light metal in the guns melted. The important documents and heirloom photos were dust.

My gun safe is now on an exterior wall to keep it from being in the middle of a house-sized oven.

The fire started from the fireplace igniting wood in the ceiling. My friend got up thinking he heard something. Smoke detector didn't go off. He saw the ceiling glowing between the tongue-and-groove joints. The family -- wife, 2 teenagers - got out with nothing but the main computer and the dog -- and they backed their vehicles out of the garage.

A 12 hour gun safe? Did you mean 1/2 hour? Never seen one rated that high before, especially a gun safe.

Anyway, if the safe was sitting in the middle of burning coals for 5 days, I don't think there's much you can do to save it. A safe can only insulate for so long, but eventually the contents are going to heat up to the same temperature as the surroundings. A true fire safe might have worked a little better, but still that's a long time for any safe.

Another option is don't put everything in one safe. Put the vital documents and pictures in a portable fire safe on the first floor near the exterior. Put the guns and coins in another safe, maybe near the exterior bolted well to a concrete foundation. That's just an example. Modify the concept to fit your priorities.

Pics and data are my most valuable possessions. So, I go overboard there. I have scans of my heirloom pics and three backups (one local backup and two external Internet backups). All modern pics are already digital and in this system. After the initial long setups, the updates are automatic background tasks.



Does that mean they did not start the cars? If so, why not?

Triple backups FTW! Me too! It's the only way to do it, there's just so much that can go screwy.

Of course, you can't put your guns in those ....

Fireproof just means the safe is rated for a temperature at a certain time. Says nothing about waterproof, what happens when internal temp rises, etc.

As far as the gun safe goes, of course there are limits. Even a two hour rated, super high end gun safe wouldn't withstand the conditions it was placed into.

I recently purchased an hour rated, mechanical lock gun safe. I installed it in the garage near an external wall. Floor cannot collapse under it and the fuel load isn't sufficient to go much more than an hour even without any intervention by the fire department.

I also keep my computer backed up on two different hard drives and rotate those between on and off site storage. I keep one at my office at all times.

Apologies for 12-hour. My fat fingers and a tablet keyboard conspired against me: it should be 2 hour. And yes, it was a high-end safe.

When he built the house he planned for where to put the safe, but what happened was not considered. And that cost him. It's one of those things that's obvious but I suspect many people don't think about.

It was spooky to pull out perfect guns -- except the stocks were charcoal.

@ireckon: yes, they evacuated through the garage. They started the vehicles and backed them out into the yard.