I also back up photos and videos to a portable hard drive and I keep that in the safe with the spoons. It would be better to take it offsite, but I always forget to do that....

Dumb question - how much heat does it take to destroy a portable hard drive? I'm guessing a spoon has a higher tolerance. While investigating safes (and Art knows way more than I) the fire ratings in minutes are based on when paper combusts minus 50 or so degrees F...or so I am told.

Best (for cloud service skeptics) would be to either leave a backup drive with family and/or work site. But that is a pain...

whatever is in my HD. $60/year I live in brushfire country, so offsite backup is a must.

I ghost an image file onto a Western Digital 2Tb external disk. I don't care about losing a file or two. I just can't face building a new laptop up with all my applications and preferences.

They start to fail at 120 deg F under operating conditions. The bearing caps melt after that and spill lubricant all over the platters. 350 deg and the plastic parts start to melt. But all of that is academic really, a place like On-Track can pull the metal platters and recover the data. The platters are aluminum and melt around 640 deg iirc.

I've seen a few drives survive fires, and the platters were mostly always recoverable in a clean room with the correct tools, but how much do you want to pay? I've seen recovery bills as high as 15k on some of the really bad ones.

At home I use a Netgear NAS with mirrored drives which I also backup to an offsite USB external disc. I use CrashPlan for online cloud backup but it takes FOREVER to get that going. I have over 1TB of stuff I consider critical.

At work we have an elaborate system with LTO tape auto-changers and RAID discs that snapshot changes every 2 hours. As a software business, we cannot afford data loss or system downtime.