Protecting like a professional:
===============================

Once you learn the importance of source code archival, here are some serious ways to protect them.

FIRE-PROTECTION SAFES / MEDIA SAFES

Storage: Get a heavy metal combination lock safe. There are two basic types for this. You need a Fire-Protection Safe primarily. Such a safe is rated by placing them in an 1850 degree fahrenhheit furnace and measuring the time interval that the interior stays below 350 degrees fahrenheit. At that temperature rating, paper and printed records will NOT brown or crisp. Paper burns at around 451 degrees fahrenheit (check the sci-fi title to be shure. :)

Choice of time duration have to do with the building you place it within. The lowest rating is 30 minutes, but a 1 hour fire safe should be sufficient. After all you're better off than most as soon as you have a safe.

350 degrees fahrenheit is too hot for media storage which is what we'd prefer to deal with. This temperature will still melt your media options. A Media safe has either additional interior foam insulation or insulated cabinets into a normal fire protection safe. The key here is to keep the media section internal temperature below 150 degrees fahrenheit for the fire rated duration.

Media Safes are very expensive and unlikely practical in situations here. A practical solution is a good sized fire protection safe with a media insulator that sits inside. These look like beverage coolers and instead you place your floppies, tapes or CD-roms inside and place it in your fire protection safe. The cooler insulates external 350 degrees fahrenheit environment to the required 150 degrees fahrenheit inside. You must remember to place the cooler and the media in the closed safe to be protected. A media cooler outside the safe is worthless.

Fire protection safes are not like normal theft protection safes. Their construction uses and internal and external metal skin with a concrete hybrid insulating the space between. Fire protection safes tend to be thicker and posible heavier per unit volume internal storage space.

Many companies offer a Fire and Theft protection safe which in my opinion is the best. These safes won't keep out James Bond because it looks to me like they have no defense from shaped charges, but they will protect you as a professional coder as much as you need. And since employess are usually the biggest security threat, these safes are beyond their capability.

I don't advise wall safes or any such gimmick safes. Stay away from digital keypad entry. A big fat safe that no one can carry away is best for commercial use. Make sure you don't place the safe along an exterior wall because low-tech theives often crash the wall and haul the safe away for later opening. My safe expert tells me that the majority of commercial safe-crackers are very low-tech and unskilled - nothing like the TV and Movie versions of the safe-cracker.

Many safes also come with a bolt-to-foundation option wherein you have to open the safe to unbolt it from the intended concrete foundation.

As you can imagine from my knowledge of safes for this purpose, I bought a nice one for my company. I won't recommend a brand because I offer no information about the existance of my safe or safes or location. :) I didn't even let the manufacturer install it - its common to use separate people so that the company that has record of the safe combination, have no way of knowing where in the world that safe resides. Separating these two peices of information protect you against employees in the safe company, involving themselves in crimes after-hours. :)

aka j