As far as making sure my important files survive a fire.. I use Carbonite online backup to keep my entire drive contents securely backed up in a remote location.. works pretty well. I had my brother sign up for it too, and it rescued all his data when his laptop hard drive crashed.
I used to put Linux on the re-writeable CD's, so I've had them a long time. Now the Distro's are on DVD's so I use them now. Don't use the CD's much but they are great for this aplication.
Putting them online is something I hadn't thought about until it was brought up in this forum. I use a portable hard drive to backup 5 computers here at home also. I have over 10GB of USB fobs that use SD memory within arms reach that we use to share a lot of family pictures with family that lives out of state by mailing them back and forth.
Storage is what you have handy and is already payed for. Cheap to mail.
I've seen some good ideas in this thread.
Regular CDR's that are not rewriteable are actually more stable for long term storage. They are extremely cheap these days. You can burn an awful lot of standard CDR's for the price of one rewriteable, and they are more likely to be readable 5 or 10 years from now. If you really want to get silly, there are "medical CDR's" that are more expensive, but are stable for much longer.
My suggestion is to make several copies to standard CD's and keep them in a few locations. Keep a copy on your computer, too. Heck, one under the drivers seat of your car would probably be okay, too. Not the glove box, which gets much hotter.
No single storage method is completely secure. Best to have it stored in multiple places. A cd in your desk drawer at work, one at a friend or neighbor's house, etc.
Storing an additonal copy on your email account is nice, but even the biggest ISP's have had data disasters, and they have also changed hands and deleted accounts or discontinued service for no apparent reason. None of them are too big to fail or change.
Oops. Wrong URL. I meant to send people to the one for the fire/water resistant HARD DRIVE.
It reminds me of an old Alan King bit. He said he had a small fire in his house and called his insurance agent to initiate a claim. The agent looked up his policy and said, "I see here that you have our Fire and Theft policy." King acknowledged that that was what he had. "OK, let's see, said the agent,"was anything stolen?" "No," replied King, "just fire damage." The agent said he was sorry, but a claim wasn't possible. "What do you mean, I can't make a claim?" replied King, "I had a FIRE." "I understand," replied the agent, "but in order to be covered, you would need to have our Fire OR Theft policy."
Or "archival DVD"
Re-writable optical media is probably the worst possible choice for reliability (next to floppies).
Even the write-once media got some bad press a few years ago in InfoWorld and/or PC World.
Then fix it. If your non-documented dog bites someone who then sues you, your insurance may not cover. Don't take this needless risk.
Yes, but the easiest way to find a source is to look for them as "Medical CD" or "Medical DVD"
Some brands are markedly more reliable than others. Verbatim are excellent.
Really?? Still a heck of a lot better than magnetic tape - or NVRam. The big drawback to today's rewritables for archival use is they CAN be erased and over-written or altered while write-once media cannot.
Then of course there is the issue of poor quality Chinese Crap being passed off as quality media - but that's a totally different story.
And warn your agent/broker to be sure his E&O coverage is up to date. He may be needing it if this is his common MO.
I wouldn't count on that. I believe Dick Cheney is there right now, reading and editing them.
Ask your broker, not us. Who the heck are we that you would potentially jeopardize your (and your family's) financial future over?
If for some inexplicable reason you don;t trust your broker, talk to your local, municipal, state/province or federal regulator
In cases like this it's always good to get a real and professional opinion.
if you have a claim the company can claim insurance fraud and not pay anything.... insurance fraud is serious. you can go to jail, although in these examples they may just not pay.
the broker just wants the comission
My daughter is a registered broker - and this kind of practice is SERIOUS. There are unscrupulous brokers out there who will do ANYTHING to write a policy, for the small commission involved.
They can lose a LOT by pulling those tricks. They want to be sure their E&O insurance is paid up - and if they get caught once too often, they may be unable to GET E&O insurance in the future.
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