Agree with Jim, call your agent. Pictures and receipts are good if an item is unusually expensive.

READ YOUR POLICY. Some policies make you get a rider if you have over a certain amount of jewelry or valuable art.

Suzi, fire is scary. I hope you have plans in place for escaping to a different area should the fire look like it is coming your way. Most important in your house are you, your loved ones and pets.

Putting the zip drive in the fire safe might not offer you all the protection your want. Make more than one copy and store it in a safety deposit box or give a copy to someone you trust.

Fire safes are rated and you can usually find the label on the door. Ours is a two hour safe and it's designed not exceed an internal temperature of 125 degrees. It's also waterproof - not all of them are. To protect paper the internal temperature shouldn't exceed 350 degrees, but photographic slides or tapes need to be in a safe that's rated not to exceed 150 degrees. Computer discs and DVDs need a safe rated for 125 degrees.

In addition to taking photos you can also video tape the entire house. Walk into each room and verbally describe what you see, open the closets and cabinets too.

If you have the receipts you can make copies of those too. Check your insurance policy - does it pay a depreciated value for furnishings or does it pay for a full replacement. Will your insurance cover the cost of temporary housing while your home is being repaired or rebuilt?

If some item is really valuable, in order to get it covered you usually have to have the item professionally appraised and buy an insurance rider to cover it. Otherwise, you should take pictures, keep receipts and get a a 'replacement cost' policy. You need to have it professionally appraised and update your policy each year, as the value increases. This would be the case for your home and its contents.

Our insurance company sent an appraiser to the home. He measured every room, took photos, noted the improvements and upgrades and also gave suggestions on things to do to make the home safer. He told us we might want to remove 2 huge white pines that were next to the home and install motion activated lights to the detached garage.

We received a nice credit for having a new roof, a burglar and fire alarm with 24/7 monitoring, a whole house generator, smoke and heat sensors, and automatic water shut off in case the hot water tank decides to leak. While we don't have fire hydrants on our street we still received a discount since the fire department is under 5 miles from our home.

"Putting the zip drive in the fire safe might not offer you all the
protection your want. Make more than one copy and store it in a safety
deposit box or give a copy to someone you trust.".

Exactly! Same is true for the safety of valuables too. Few home safe installations offer the protection of a safe deposit box in a vault at a bank.

No need to prove value, just to document ownership.

I don't think it would hurt to store those pics on a website, either a photo site or even to your own email or Facebook page.

We live in a sever fire zone in the Southern Sierras I have
a complete household inventory on zip drives. We update regularly and I do take
pictures of every open drawer, cabinet nook and cranny in the house, garage and
out buildings. Even with a high deductable I wouldn’t anticipate any problem getting
the full value of our content insurance. According to our insurance agent pictures
are a great tool along with any documentation. My DD has a copy as does my DGS
plus the pictures are on my iPad.

A few years ago I made some phone calls and found out I could
get copies of purchase history from places like Costco and such, I can go back years
on my ordered from Amazon, the same for eBay and I can get copies of back visa
bills for I think 5 years. We put everything possible on the Visa card. I keep
any important recipes in a safe we have in our grandson’s home out of state along
with our personal papers and original trusts I keep copy’s here at home.

We have been evacuated several times in the last 30 years we
have been very lucky but we know people who last everything and the fireproof
safes they had were mostly gone the ones that were intact only has ash inside.

I know one person that her insurance company made her list
everything with date purchased and cost. I spoke to our State Farm agent and he
said some times they will do that and sometimes not.

One time a water dropping helicopter came down so close to
our house it shook it badly enough to break a water pipe. Our insurance paid
for an 11 day stay at the Marriott while everything was fixed the only issue we
had was the Marriott was 60 miles down the mountain.

All we can do is keep everything cleared around the house,
have an evacuation plan and make sure we have everything possible on our
insurance policy to cover us. Make sure you have building code upgrades and
demolition some policies don’t automatically include them.

A safe deposit box in a vault at a bank is great if your bank
is not in the fire zone plus anything you have in the box is not insured by the
bank and may or may not be covered with your home owners insurance.

My insurance does not automatically cover electronics including computer gear unless you inventory it along with its replacement cost. The inventory has to be shown to the company and they will quote a cost adder to add those items ot your home insurance. The same goes for big screen TVs. For flat screen TVs in the $200 range, it may not pay to insure.

The best insurance for data is to keep an updated copy off site. I would not trust it to a fire proof safe because its interior can get too hot for digital storage media. That would only work if the safe was doused soon after the fire started.

For really important data, do not wholly trust thumb drives although those have improved. Check the date of manufacture of the drive. Its usually on the packaging. Estimate its reliable life at 7 years. Do not buy a drive that is already 2 to 3 years old. That's probably why its for sale. Thumb drives contain a "keep-alive" cell (battery). Its memory requires a voltage to retain its state. The drain is very low, but the voltage source is a battery and will eventually fail. The battery life of a low drain lithium cell may be 10 yrs. However, some are going to drop voltage before this. Tadiran (sp?) has developed a storage cell that is good for 20 yrs, but I do not think this technology has been included in thumb drives - Thumb drive prices are too low.

Do not store critical data on CDs. Five to ten years from now, equipment to read these may be obsolete. The market indications are present. DVD technology is predicted to endure longer than CD. Long term digital data storage for individuals has not been solved so its owner beware. Be prepared to copy the data to new emerging technology when it appears.

Thanks to all of you for your ideas and help. We will be getting a safe deposit box at the bank in town. It's not in a high fire zone. I will make a secret board on Pinterest to house all my documentation photos. Going to scan all the documents and white out any social security no's and host those somewhere on line too.