Choosing The Proper Safe

The following is an overview of the various types of safes. As you browse our site you will note that sometimes, more than one kind of safe will meet your requirements. That’s when the dimensions or the look of a safe can become the main factors in deciding which safe to choose.

A good Safe will carry a Fire Protection rating, Data Protection rating or Security rating dependent on the type of safe. Please view our rating page for additional information on safe ratings.

Stand alone units come in many different sizes and design but all basically fall into one of four main categories;

• Burglary Safes
• Fire Safes
• Burglary/Fire Safes
• Data Safes

Burglary Safe - is designed primarily to protect the contents against theft and will generally offer little or no protection against the damage of contents by fire or other risk.

Fire Safe - is basically designed to protect contents (primarily papers) against fire damage and typically offer only a minimal level of security. Fire safes are tested and rated in respect of their performance in the event of a fire.

Test criteria will include the length of time (normally specified as minutes - 30, 60, 90 or 120), in a fire of a specified temperature, that the safe can maintain an internal temperature of below 200 degrees C (the point at which documents will be destroyed).

A safe achieving a particular standard will be rated accordingly, e.g. a safe rated as VDMA/120 would indicate that the model has been tested to and met the VDMA 120 minute test.

Fire/Burglary Safes - These are generally multi-purpose safes and offer good security against forced entry as well as protection from fire.

Data Safe - is similar to a fire safe but to be effective, must in the event of a fire, maintain a much lower internal temperature than a fire safe (less than 52 degrees C - the point at which data media is destroyed) and also protect against other hazards such as high humidity, electro magnetic contamination, etc. Test ratings are applied in a similar way to those for fire safes however for a data safe, much more demanding.