Getting a new copy of your birth certificate or social security card from the DMV can feel like a little taste of purgatory. A document safe will protect your important papers from damage, fire, and theft making extra sure you won’t be waiting six hours for your number to be called.
What to Look for in a Document Safe
Lots of document safes on the market claim protection from different things. You’ll want to make sure the safe you purchase offers the protection and capacity that fit your needs.
- Protection: A good safe protects its contents from being damaged or destroyed whether its dropped, soaked, or burned. Document safes need to be fire-resistant and last around 30 minutes to an hour when engulfed in a fire. Safes should also be capable of being fully submerged in water without leaking.
- Capacity: Document safes don’t need to be particularly big. They aren’t designed to hold rifles or mountains of gold bars. The safe should be able to fit normal sized paper (Letter, A4, Legal) and other little things like CDs and USBs, but it doesn’t need to be much bigger than that. Some document safes are designed like filing cabinets, with a hanging file system for an easy way to organize all your sensitive information.
- Lock Security: A safe needs to protect your stuff from fire and water, but safes also have locks for a reason. There are many different kinds of locks on safes, and some are less secure than others. A normal key-locked safe will be cheaper but easy to pick if given enough time and physical access. Keypads and fingerprint scanners are more secure but can be expensive and hard to find on small document safes.
A Word on In-Wall Safes
In-wall safes can be an attractive option because they don’t take up any floor or closet space and can be easily hidden behind a painting or poster. However, most options available tend to be very bad at protecting your documents from natural disasters.
An in-wall safe needs to have multiple holes (usually at least four) for mounting the safe in-between two wall studs. Having these holes means that in the event of a fire or a flood, everything in your safe is likely to be damaged or destroyed. Fires don’t care if most of the safe is closed; the holes mean no insulation from the heat.
Some in-wall safes are built with an interior fire-liner, which means no holes lead directly into the cavity with your documents. This allows the safe to be fire resistant while still having mounting holes, but the safes that have this feature are hundreds of dollars.
If you’re not worried about water and fire resistance and just want to conceal your safe inside a wall, you can try one of these two from Paragon. Otherwise, because of the lack of water- and fire-resistance (or the high cost on models that do include this), we’re leaving them off of our list.
The Best Overall: Honeywell 1104
The Honeywell 1104 is a durable safe that will protect all your documents from all kinds of harm. The safe is rated to last for an hour in fires up to 1,700° F and can be fully submerged as deep as 39 inches for up to 100 hours, keeping all the contents inside safe and dry. The weakest part of the safe is its standard key lock which can be picked, but that requires physical access, practice, and patience.
The 40-pound safe’s inside compartment is 14.8 inches by 12 inches and can fit all normal paper sizes (Letter, A4, Legal) without requiring you to fold or bend your documents. The safe has a depth of 3.8 inches, so even after it’s filled with documents, you should still have room for CDs, DVDs, USBs, and more.
Honeywell Safes & Door Locks – 1 Hour Fire Safe Waterproof Safe Box Chest with Carry Handle, Large, 1104
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