Fire safes are nothing new, but most people forget that paper burns at a relatively high temperature. Media, on the other hand, is much more fragile and consequently a data safe needs to keep a much lower internal temperature than something designed to just protect paper.

Of course if you’re using a data safe to keep your precious hard drive full of backups safe, you can’t use the drive. Until now. SentrySafe have built a Maxtor 160Gb hard drive into a fire and water resistant casing. The result is a USB hard drive that is fire-resistant for 1 hour. The drive can be used just like any other external hard disk but if the worst happens and your home or office burns down, there’s a fair chance that your data will still be accessible afterwards.

Continuing the USB-connected theme, they also have a range of more conventional data safes that have internal USB connectivity. This enables you to house the USB hard drive of your choice inside the safe along with documents, CD backups etc and still use it as normal.

The larger data safe is rated to 2 hours fire resistance and if you do find that data is unreadable after a fire SentrySafe offer a free data recovery service included in the purchase price of all these products so