?Locking up your papers/money? | Your stories | Discussion forum

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From my experience . . .

Unless you're willing to pay Huge Bucks for a UL Listed Crime Safe (TL-15 rated, or better). And then spend more Huge Bucks to have it installed to manufacture's specs, you're much better off using a Safety Deposit Box at a Bank.

Safes typically purchased from retail sources (even the so-called Good Ones), are often referred to as; Toy Safes.

'Caveat Emptor'

Dean

The safe has its own problems as well. Unless it is in a concrete bunker and bolted to the ground with gigantic stainless steel / titanium bolts and nuts, it can be removed by thieves.

AltaRed has also highlighted the problems with SDBs.

My advice: have some sort of fire-resistant box for the papers, but not necessarily thief-proof (difficult to do that anyway), and keep digital copies of them. Some jurisdictions, like B.C., allow digital wills, if digitally signed and encrypted with special software, allowing you to store your original will digitally with a place like Willful. Keep some money at home, separate from the papers, but keep it to a small amount, an amount you won't worry about if it burns or is stolen.

Cheers,
Doug

GIC-Fanatic said
Ok, so my 30 year old Sentry safe from Costco has failed. Once opened, pulling up the lever to close and secure the door is impossible.

While that battery power is not needed to close, I later changed the batteries. In hindsight changing the batteries should be a “first” when a safe (with an electronic combination) begins to be uncooperative.

So I YouTube the problem. Thankfully the safe in question was “open”. I stripped back the back side plastic panel of the door. Wow, surprisingly cheap. Plastic teeth, cheap metal parts, a solenoid and a few small springs. Solenoid was ok but a small lever that depresses, when you close the door no longer moves freely and prevents the locking lever mechanism to be “pulled up” to lock. I gave the moving parts a good dousing of silicone lubricant. Let sit overnight. No improvement. And then find a small piece of broken off plastic. So have decided not to pursue as I don’t want it to be in a “closed” position and can’t open. 30 years of service was a good run.

And I do read that a huge magnet can close the solenoid to allow door to open. I did not pursue how to release the key controlled secondary locking button. So basically, the quality of safe only keeps out an “honest” person.

The 2 locking points are amazingly chintzy.

The original Costco purchase included shelves and a plastic internal lock box. And today they are chargeable add ons.

It looks like a replacement safe of similar size comes in 4 versions and hopefully I can re use the internal extras.

My questions:
Your preferred safe manufacturer?
Your preferred locking method…old fashioned unchangeable dial combination or a changeable electronic/solenoid option?
Dual or single lock door?
Recommended location of safe?

Any alternatives? (Other than a safety deposit box.)

Thanks.  

A safe that can't be found is pretty safe. In your particular situation I would keep the old safe and put some duplicated legal papers in it and some old silver spoons ? or something that most people wouldn't consider neccessary to put in a safe and then get another safe and attempt to hide it well. In case you do experience a break in or a home invasion the decoy safe might do the trick.

I have a 4-drawer locked filing cabinet full of most useless, really heavy stuff, it would take 4 guys or so to get it out of the basement. I keep my usb's with my digital info in there hidden amidst all that other junk. Nothing is completely safe, that, along with a SDB for some docs and emergency cash, is just what I've decided to use.

What about those fake hollowed out books you put in amidst your other books on a bookshelf?

We have one of those really old safes in the office. The office police said it is too heavy for the floor to support.

The gangster Al Capone had a safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Al_Capone%27s_Vaults

Thanks, cgouimet, that's a good idea, I have the same set up under my front porch, no-one would ever look in there behind all the canned food, jars, etc.

COIN said
"I closed my TD account recently and just maintain the same documents, USB sticks"

What is the life of a USB stick? I keep some personal photos on external harddrives and fear that one day the data will all be corrupted. These photos are irreplaceable.  

I don't know but being solid state it has to be much better than hard drives. I have some USB sticks that have been in use for 10+ years and still work but they are low capacity - 16-64Mb.

All my critical data (Word, Excel, PDF documents and JPG's) are kept in one folder hierarchy on my PC's hard drive.

USB sticks or thumb drives are quite cheap. The last ones I purchased are listed at 5 for $30Cdn on Amazon.

Every quarter, I copy that entire hierarchy onto a 64Gb USB stick and rename that folder with an embedded date like "2024-12", "2025-03". At this point the USB stick includes 2022 YE, 2023 YE, 2024 YE and 2025 Q1, Q2 and Q3. And there's lots of space left.

That USB stick is then cloned onto 3 other identical USB sticks. It's doubtful they will all die at the same time. So, if one gets corrupted, my plan is to reformat it and then clone one of the others onto it. And then go and purchase a new set of USB sticks to replace them all.

Any drive, whether HDD (mechanical) or SSD (solid state) or USB stick (solid state) can fail at any time but is most dependent on number of 'writes'. A drive used infrequently except for backup will last longer than one used daily. Age also plays a factor in addition to 'writes'.

The limitation on HDDs is generally the mechanical components. The limit on SSDs is the number of 'writes' in each storage cell and a controller is used to distribute the 'writes' across all the storage cells and if a 1TB SSD only normally stores 250GB of data, that allows the controller to use all storage cells less often. AFAIK, USB sticks do not have the same kind of control mechanism to spread use across storage cells so in theory, a USB stick may not last as long. I have read about 'life' being 10,000 to 100,000 write cycles or perhaps 10 years.

The short answer to all the above is if one is using any type of solid state storage as an external backup and 'writing' is infrequent, such a device could last over a decade. For more info, one might want to read https://www.ontrack.com/en-ca/blog/how-long-do-ssds-really-last

It is a reason to keep two external storage devices, either two physical ones, one cloud and one physical, or two cloud sources. For myself, I use the cloud as one source for ongoing 'live' backups and an external HDD as a secondary backup which I update maybe once a year.

AltaRed said

That is probably a good idea though I have rarely had the discipline to refresh (re-write) a couple hundred GB of data on either a SSD or HDD that often over the past 35 years. I have never had any kind of drive failure.....yet!. It just takes too much time.... so I have reverted to cloud storage as my primary data backup and avoid USB sticks for anything other than temporary usage. My old external HDD should probably be trashed.  

I prefer to refresh my old and/or new USB sticks quarterly than trust my data privacy/security to someone's cloud. Yes, it takes time to refresh the stick(s) but I don't have to sit there and move the bits, supervise the process or watch the progress bar, I just need to trigger it and come back when it's done.