| By :
Wendy Moyer
All too many business owners and homeowners use the wrong type of safe in their attempts to protect their property. Therefore, the main criteria anyone should consider before buying a safe is what they want to protect and who - or what - they want to protect the safe's contents from. Different types of safes are designed for different functions. For example, gun safes are designed to protect firearms; fire safes are designed to protect documents from fires, burglary safes are designed to protect its contents from forced entry, etc. A lot of people put their valuables and money into their record safe or their fire safe. Others put important documents into a safe that's designed to thwart burglars. And a lot of people put DVDs, CDs, hard drives, their laptops, and other computer related material into a regular fire safe, record safe, or burglary safe. Any of these can end up as very costly mistakes. Here is an overview of what different types of safes are designed for and why they work the way they do. Fire Safes and/or Record Safes Fire and/or record safes are designed to protect paper based documents from burning. Paper begins to char at around four hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Record/fire safes are built to keep their internal temperatures under three hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Some fire safes will protect documents for a matter of minutes while others will protect the documents for several hours. You will be able to determine the length of time by how the safe is rated. One of the ways these safes keep their internal temperatures down is by converting any moisture that's within the safe into steam. Although this will protect paper records it can damage other types of media. Media Safes Depending on what media it is designed to protect, a media safe will keep its internal temperature below either seventy two degrees Fahrenheit or one hundred twenty five degrees Fahrenheit. These types of safes don't use moisture to protect their contents. Although you can keep your paper documents in media safes you will pay considerably more for this type of safe than you would pay for most other kinds of fire safes. Because both media safes and fire/record safes are designed to reduce the transfer of heat and are, in many cases, designed to be portable they are made from either composite materials or thin metal. Consequently, they aren't designed to protect their contents from any forceful attacks. Their locking devices will not prevent a burglar from getting inside. They will just help to keep honest people a bit more honest. Burglary Safes Burglary safes are specifically designed to protect your valuables from attack. They're made of thick, heavy metal plates or other materials that are there to deter any attacks from tools. Burglary safes can be rated for their torch resistance, tool resistance, and explosives resistance. For the most part these types of safes aren't designed to protect their contents from fire, although there are some dual rated safes that can offer both theft and fire protection.
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