Water / Fire safe that can still let Time Capsule be seen?

[lesliegolf]

Sorry if this has been asked before. I did a quick search on the boards.

I am currently sitting at my local computer store. Syncing my iPhone hit a bad sector on my HD and sent my HD and iPhone tumbling.

My current backup is about every 3-4 weeks. 2 different drives. I swap and stick them, when done, in a waterproof firesafe.

After this "situation" I really want to move to time machine and a time capsule and some remote saves to iDisk via backup (I travel about 7 months a year). However, I do not want to leave the capsule sitting out in the open.

Does anyone know a safe good enough to keep a capsule safe but enable a Mac to see it from lets say 10 feet away?

I know its a wacky question. Hope its worded correctly. I have been up all night in retrieval mode.

 

[DaveF]

I can't give you exactly what you're asking about, but here are two possible solutions for robust backups, that can survive flood, fire, or famine.

Fire & Waterproof Harddrive

Online backup service such as Mozy unaffected by any tragedy at your computer's location. It also runs daily, providing more current backups than your 2-week cycle.

Use Time Capsule to complement one or both of these solutions.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Does anyone know a safe good enough to keep a capsule safe but enable a Mac to see it from lets say 10 feet away?

Not gonna happen.
#1, it would have to be airtight, so the TC will cook itself.
#2 the density of ceramic and metal is almost certainly going to block any WiFi signal.

Same problem with waterproof -- you could seal it in tupperware, but without ventilation for the hard drive to cool, you're still cooked. You add ventilation - you lose watertight.

Also: Firesafes are meant to keep paper from burning, which means they can still get up to 400F inside. Any CDs, plastics, backup tapes or hard drives will be melted or irretrievably damaged long before then. A regular firesafe is not suitable for data storage. There are DATA safes available, but they are horrendously expensive.

Offsite is the only way to go.

 

[26139]

Yep

Agreed for all the above reasons. It's POSSIBLE to store a hard drive in a safe and take it out for backups, but not used in the safe.

How would you power it? How would you ventilate it? How would you connect to it?

And yes, it would most likely melt in a fire.

 

[DaveF]

Agreed for all the above reasons. It's POSSIBLE to store a hard drive in a safe and take it out for backups, but not used in the safe.

How would you power it? How would you ventilate it? How would you connect to it?

And yes, it would most likely melt in a fire.

As I noted, there are fireproof hard-drives as well as fireproof safes with integrated USB harddrives. Sentry is one manufacturer I know of. There are likely others.

They are not cheap, but seem reasonable compared to traditional firesafes, if that's something you need.