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While both a safe and a lockbox can help keep your belongings protected from theft, they offer very different levels of security. To find out whether a lockbox will give you enough protection for the items you want to store in it, or whether a high security safe would better suit your needs, we’ve compiled a short guide to both:

What is a lockbox and what protection does it offer?

Technically, a lockbox is a type of safe, but there are too many differences between the two to make choosing a lockbox over a safe, a simple choice.

Lockboxes come in two varieties: standard and personal protection, and both are typically small and easy to access. A standard lockbox will suit you if you have something of relatively low importance to protect, and you need to access it frequently. For example, if you’re having a yard sale and you want to keep some cash locked away in something that will be close enough and easy enough for you to get to when you need to, a lockbox will probably suffice.

Personal protection boxes usually refer to an item used to store guns in.

What makes a safe different to a lockbox?

Safes come in a variety of sizes and offer varying levels of protection for valuable, important, or sentimental items, such as jewelry and documents. Most come with an electronic or combination lock, and some can be installed into a wall or the floor for added security. Choose from regular high security residential and commercial safes to ones with fire ratings, that will protect their contents for a certain amount of time when exposed to high temperatures, such as you might experience during a fire.

Safes are far more difficult to infiltrate than a lockbox, and due to their weight, are much harder for a thief to simply pick up and carry away.

Do you need a lockbox or a safe?

While a lockbox may be perfectly adequate for storing small amounts of cash in on a temporary basis, the level of protection it offers can in no way be compared to that of a safe.

Residential safes are ideal for storing valuable or sentimental items such as jewelry in, especially as thieves will often target such items as they’re easy to grab when they’re in a hurry and can easily be sold or pawned. If you have a lot of jewelry to protect or have a couple of items of particularly high value, then you should consider purchasing a jewelry safe, which will have compartments and drawers inside to store the items neatly.

High security safes with a fire rating (meaning that they protect the contents of the safe from damage during a fire for a certain period; often up to 2 hours) are best for protecting items of high value both at home or in an office or commercial premises, since they give you the most peace of mind, and will challenge even the most determine and well equipped of intruders.

To invest in a high security safe to protect your items of value, drop in to your local safe showroom today, or call up a local safe expert to discuss your options in more detail.