I've talked about ioSafe's fire-resistant USB hard drive and NAS solutions in previous posts and even posted the response I got from the company's CEO. Last week they took me out for lunch and offered a Riverside Drive barbecue, which I, afraid of how Hoboken's finest would respond, politely declined. The motivation for this was their newest product, the ioSafe 3.5, which wraps a 2.5-inch hard drive in shiny steel and fireproofing to enable it to survive 1,400 degrees F for 15 minutes and waterproof to 5 feet for 24 hours while still fitting in the space normally used by a 3.5-inch hard disk. And ioSafe is so confident its little drive in a box will survive that it will spring for $2,500 of data-recovery services should you need it.On the one hand, I'm as much of a pyromaniac as the next guy and did things with various nitrates and other unstable molecules in the '70s and '80s that would have the friendly man from homeland security at my door in a minute today, so I think fireproof hard drives are just cool.

On the other hand, as a so-called expert in data protection and disaster recovery, I know that planning perfect protection from any single type of disaster just means that some other disaster is coming to get you. So for most SMB users I'd rather see a less-resistant local backup solution like a standard USB hard drive and an online backup service, even a consumer one like Mozy or Carbonite, so the data will be protected from the 12-foot storm surge, tornado, earthquake, anthrax release, atomic train, or other Irwin Allen movie scenario.

That said, isolated locations like environmental research stations, soybean processing plants, and oil shale extraction facilities that can't get data off-site automatically would find the $330 to $460 ioSafe wants for a fireproof hard drive a bargain.