Safety deposit boxes are subject to disaster too, so your best bet is to have your data distributed to multiple trusted locations. During hurricane Allison in Houston a few years ago the downtown area was flooded and most high rise buildings, banks, hospitals, Universities, office buildings, and federal court houses had their basements flooded. Sad to say but many of the banks had their safety deposit boxes in their vaults in the basements. They are not water tight under flood conditions and thousands of safety deposit boxes were flooded. The law library at the University of Houston was lost also. So digitize those photos and documents and put them on external hard drives and CD's and DVD's and distribute them to various trusted relatives and put copies in your safety deposit boxes, etc. Backups should always be at a remote location from where your original digial and hard copies are kept. David Pitts [email protected] wrote: I have 4 portable file boxes with handles that I keep all of my files in and a notebook with plastic sheets to keep birth, death and marriage certificates in. That way, I can grab the file boxes in a hurry. I keep all of my photo albums deep in a hallway cabinet, not up in the front of the cabinet. When our house caught on fire back in 1997 every bit of my genealogy survived. It all had soot on it and I spent months cleaning it all up but it survived. I also send my Family Tree Maker database to myself via e mail and save it in my saved e mail just in case something happens to my computer. I have AOL and I save it to "Saved on AOL". That way I can retrieve it from anywhere that I am. I also upload my database to a web site with photos and documents so that I can always print them off again or burn them to a CD and get the photos remade just in case something happens to my originals. >From someone who has been there! Julie ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message