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At 12:59 PM 10/12/01 -0400, you wrote: >I'd say you are probably insufficiently paranoid. Particularly regarding >fire risks. The risk in distance being measured in yards is that a fire >may very well spread to endanger the other buildings. >The data on the tapes, if ever needed, might be priceless. >I suggest a safety deposit box in a bank a couple of miles away, >that happens to be on somebody's lunch route. Even if you buy lunch for >making the trip it will be far less then the cost of a large media >cabinet that is fire resistant or losing the data. We considered the safety deposit box thing several years ago, but were uneasy about putting tapes in a place where we didn't have 24x7 access. The way I do it now is keep the very most recent set of tapes in my office, and the 2nd most recent at the other site, and it varies from there on. Eventually I'll be looking at shifting a bagful of tapes each week -- though not so many that I can't easily carry them. The person who does this will be me most of the time, and I just can't afford the time it would take to go to a bank once a week. And I need to be able to get at those next-to-most-recent tapes relatively quickly when I need them, or people won't want to rely on our backup system. (There aren't any banks within two miles of where we're located, although it helps that our miles are faster than those in East Lansing.) However, one faculty member here didn't like my definition of "off-site," so I have lately been thinking of taking a smaller subset of the tapes that won't rotate as frequently, and storing them farther away at an off-off-site location. I may use a safety deposit box for that set. Another option I once had in mind was a redundant set of tapes, but I've abandoned that idea at least for now. >Nema rated enclosures are designed for electrical equipment in areas >that need to be hosed down for cleaning. Such as a dairy or bio lab. >Openings or doors are gasketed with multiple evenly distributed closures. >They will protect against water damage that comes with fire hoses putting >out a fire, but the media inside would be cooked if the fire got near >enough that the area needed hosing down. I'm thinking mostly of how easy it is to trigger a sprinkler system, even when the fire is off in another corner of the building. Remember Ag Hall! >Which leads to the other consideration of fire safety for media. >A safe that adequately protects documents will allow media to be >rendered useless. A media fire safe costs four to ten times more >then a documents fire safe. My previous employer bought a media >safe of about the size you need. The price two years ago was a bit >over two grand, delivered. I will keep that in mind. Thanks for the helpful information. It might be useful sometime to point out that there are those who think I'm insufficiently paranoid! John Gorentz