This is a sad, but all too regular occurrence- and not just for "home
businesses" but for businesses in office settings and regular folks personal
records as well.

A lot of people make backups and think if it's safely removed from the
computer, that's good enough... or the make copies of valuable papers and
store them in a 'fire box' or in a cabinet in another room.

One of the first rules for protection of vital assets is SEPARATION, also
referred to as DISPERSAL of your second copies or backups.  This should be
AT MINIMUM a distance great enough so that the event you're attempting to
protect them from is unable to affect both the primary and secondary copy.

In the case of fire, it should definitely not be in the same structure and
if you live in an area prone to wildfires, it shouldn't be in an area
smaller than the worst recorded fire to hit the area you're in in the
recorded past.  

Similarly with floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes you should look
to store your backups or secondary copies at distances farther away than
known hazards and their known or projected geographic boundaries.   If these
events in the past have been known to cause damage to areas of up to 50
square miles, then you should be storing outside of those distances from
your principal place of business or your home. 

They should also be stored away form other known or potential hazards or
threats.  If you're using a public storage area or commercial storage
provider, get familiar with the adjacent businesses and/or their location.  

Is there an auto repair facility or a gas station next door? 
Any other businesses with flammables or combustible materials?  
Are they in the flight path of an airport, next to a freeway or railroad?  
Can you tell if there are any high pressure gas lines, oil or fuel lines
under the facility? (these are typically plainly marked at adjacent roadways)
Is there a fire station nearby?

Businesses stand to lose a lot for failure to take necessary precautions,
but individuals can also lose things that are irreplaceable in incidents
such as this.  With many of us having nothing but digital cameras these
days, most of our pictures are stored to hard drives or on CDs or other
removable media.  Having the backups in an adjacent room may be 'better than
nothing', but it really isn't as good as you can do.  One option is the old
famous "sneaker net" where you walk a copy to a friend's or family members
house in the next town or farther away.  Another is on-line storage, but
that comes with some risks of privacy and possible loss as well- most of the
agreements with these types of providers essentially tell you that they
accept no liability for loss or corruption of your data, so it may be
convenient... until it's not =(.   

Removable drives (from 250gb up to 2TB) are relatively cheap these days-
anywhere from $30-$200 and you can have a pair.  One you store at a remote
location, one you keep at home to burn a new "fresh" copy to for exchanging
with it, on whatever cycle you find acceptable. 

Larry
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