Ideas for Safe/Off-site Storage of Valuable Documents

threespires

When I bought my house the conveyancer gave me a load of historic documents, relating to conveyance when first sold in 1930s, plus a number of current insurances and copies of the survey reports.

I used to store this type of document with my solicitor, together with originals of school, college and degree certificates, birth certificate and the like.

Now my solicitor has stopped offering this service, even if I offered to pay, so question is: What is Best Moneysaving Option for Keeping Vital Documents in Safe Storage? And what type of firm or service is best, as I would feel safer with them in secure deposit and I'm not too keen on just relying on fireproof safe inside the house.

nomoneytoday

metro Bank?

lincroft1710

Banks used to offer storage for such documents, but no idea if they still do this.

eddddy

The demand for secure storage of physical documents is dwindling - everything is going electronic now.

So the obvious solution would be to scan the documents and put them in cloud storage.

I'm not sure that they are vital documents - assuming your house is registered, there will be an electronic copy of anything vital at Land Registry. They sound like they are interesting historical artefacts, but you can always get copies of the important ones (e.g. birth certificate, insurance certificate, and probably even the degree certificate should anyone ever ask to see it).

agrinnall

nomoneytoday wrote: »

metro Bank?

https://www.metrobankonline.co.uk/Personal/Safety-Deposit-Box/

If it's losing them in a fire that most concerns you then I would just keep them at home but scan them and put the scans into cloud storage. I doubt if any of them have any significant monetary value so the content is what you need to be able to recover. Things like degree certificates and birth certificates can be reissued if needed.

G_M

I keep mine at home in a fireproof safe, plus electron copies.

https://www.safe.co.uk/Categories/fireproof-safes/1.html

DaftyDuck

I keep mine in a safe at work, along with a back-up hard drive of everything (photos, paperwork, all blackmail resources such as G_M's last video, emails dating back 20 years and any other rubbish that can be scanned).

I have a similar HDD at home, and routinely swap backups every month (or intend to... happens less frequently than it should).

Banks and depository holders charge the earth to keep paperwork and then they invite these chaps in to help themselves, as far as I can see....


I wonder where Martin stashes his used fivers? Hmmm....

davidmcn

threespires wrote: »

When I bought my house the conveyancer gave me a load of historic documents, relating to conveyance when first sold in 1930s, plus a number of current insurances and copies of the survey reports....question is: What is Best Moneysaving Option for Keeping Vital Documents in Safe Storage?

None of these items sounds like a vital document. Old title deeds may be of historic or personal interest but not legally necessary. Don't know why you'd need a paper copy of insurance policies or survey reports, many only ever exist as pdfs these days anyway.

hanwellmike

Agree with previous commenters. Scan to pdf everything that is important so you have instant access when necessary and put the originals somewhere safe. I would have thought a fireproof safe in your home would be ideal.


Not sure about cloud storage for the pdf copies. I keep everything on a secure flash drive which I back up regularly to my desktop pc.

kinger101

hanwellmike wrote: »

Agree with previous commenters. Scan to pdf everything that is important so you have instant access when necessary and put the originals somewhere safe. I would have thought a fireproof safe in your home would be ideal.


Not sure about cloud storage for the pdf copies. I keep everything on a secure flash drive which I back up regularly to my desktop pc.

Many types of cloud storage mirror to your computer(s). So it effectively keeps stuff on all your computers and the cloud (Google Drive and Dropbox for example). Saves messing around with flash drives.

Given the size storage size of most e-mail accounts these days, it's also fairly easy to just e-mail yourself the documents and then never delete them. I've tracked down many old documents this way.

cattermole

Cloud storage is not totally safe, documents/photographs can disappear off it, just like that. I've had several friends that this has happened to.

A friend of mine who is super organised with everything, does this :

backs up to the cloud
backs up to a stand alone hard drive
she also keeps another stand alone hard drive that she keeps at a neighbors house which she backs up to every 3 months or so.

(Her prime concern is not loosing digital photos, but obviously the same principles apply.)

Stores any original documents in a fire proof cabinet/safe

At the end of the day it all depends on how important the documents / photos are to you. But if your computer gets stolen and you have no stand alone hard drive then you will have to rely on everything being in the cloud, plus depending how much you are storing in the cloud it can start to get expensive, especially with a lot of photos.

One question, with original title deeds to the property (once you no longer have a mortgage) are these replaceable should they become lost, stolen or damaged? Do we still need these?