This is another spin off from some work my wife is doing on a disaster survival guide. For film photographers, negatives are critical. It is pretty easy to protect them from flooding in Pelican cases or ammo boxes - stored in climate controlled spaces. Fire is a lot harder - as someone pointed out, fire safes are intended for paper, and media safes are dramatically bigger and more expensive.
Does this argue for even anti-digital folks to scan their negatives and put away copies in an off site location? While a good scan from a consumer scanner like a 9950 is not nearly as good a drum scan, it would be a lot better than an handful of ashes. This was not an option until recently, so it is not part of the usual workflow. While there is a lot of complaining about the changes in media formats, I have been managing digital data for 25 years now and it is not a big deal. You just have to shift to the new formats about every 5 years. This might mean no more than a day spent reburning disks. It is worth doing anyway to avoid deterioration of the media. You might not want to scan it all because of time, and you might want drum scans of the money shots.
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