Where is the safest place to keep my external hard drive.?

This question throws up a red flag in my book, this is kind of a multi-tiered question, so let me give some general advice.

A fireproof safe should certainly be sufficient to keep it protected from fire. But I'm curious how well this would do against flood, earthquake, or even your tornado scenario. And I would think a safe would be a primary target for home burglars. I've heard of thieves just carrying off the whole thing.

Here's what's more important. You don't need a major catastrophe to lose all your data on a hard drive. Especially external ones. Something as simple as being knocked around a bit can destroy a hard drive. Or many times they just up and fail on their own. A hard drive is a mechanical device with intricate sensitive parts, and is prone to several different types of failure.

So this is the most important element of your solution: Don't rely solely on a single external hard drive to keep your entire life on.

Back it up, regularly. An external hard drive is actually a good backup or secondary location, rather than a primary. It might be a good idea to keep two external drives, and for extra security keep them in different locations. If you're worried about security, you might consider a secure file server at home with data redundancy such as RAID. Then back that up weekly or maybe even daily if your'e so inclined, onto your external hard drive.

Another option people are going for these days is off-site data storage companies. You pay a monthly fee and your information is regularly backed up over the internet to a secure server somewhere far away.

If nothing else trust my experience in this point. The worst thing you can do is rely on a single piece of equipment that already has a high failure rate. This is the quintessential "putting all your eggs in one basket."

yes you can store it in the firesafe its the best place when at home, but on the move invest in a carry case with padding. Also do not rely on this as your only copy of the data you need for your life, it WILL fail at some point or suffer damage or become unusable, assume it is going to break and make preperations to have another copy, you should have at least three copies of anything to call it safe.

The external is you main copy, get a network storage device and store a backup there and also for redundancy you should do online as well there are loads of companies for this like livedrive, jungledisk, carbonite to name but three.

Do not just have one copy, consider the consequence of loosing your life as its the only copy..backup backup backup.

Also if you are scanning everything consider using some form of encryption, if you lost the drive or had it stolen the thief would in effect get everything free and clear, you could encrypt the entire drive using truecrypt or PGP if you want to pay, and online backup services are encrypted anyway...

So as youself a couple of questions, when your paperless where is all your info, what would happen if this store failed, how could i get this info back, when you can answer each question with confidence your ready to truly go paperless.

Me i am paperless, i have 4 copies in different locations including one offsite in another country! and its all encrypted.

Google has many websites that they offer to save this kind of stuff. you can use photo bucket to store scanned documents to. I use Google Documents to save all my reports etc.. This way if your house burns or even if your computer's hard drive crashes..You'll be able to just log into Google Docs from any computer and retrieve all your information.. I never save pictures to my computer.. I always save them to photo bucket for the same reason.

You can always rent a safety deposit box at the bank.. For a small one it only cost about $20 a year to rent one.

Best bet is the prebuilt Dell Inspiron 15 series. You can customize it to fit your needs. I'd say an i3 processor, 2GB of RAM, and maybe a 500GB HDD is good for you.

It should be, but if it's really that important there are companies you can pay to back up your data. Its usually not too costly, a couple bucks a month, and will back up everything on their servers.

Yes, either that or a bank vault. lool

Nowadays they have all kinds of cloud storage available, put a copy of all your "life" in cloud storage and you will never loose it.

http://www.top10cloudstorage.com/

It is easyly to if u store or save to email address

ggggg