New York--Floods, fires and a host of other natural disasters could cause you additional headaches if your personal documents are lost or destroyed.

Wells Fargo (WFC), the San Francisco bank, is aiming to alleviate that pain by launching a new service for storing electronic documents online.

Called vSafe, the service is designed to let you store electronic copies of everything from birth certificates to medical records to Social Security cards online for $4.95 a month for one gigabyte of storage, or the equivalent of roughly 10,000 documents. The program is being tested internally at Wells Fargo with its employees and is slated to roll out this summer.

“No one is happy with the current way they are storing documents,” said Jim Smith, executive vice president and head of Wells Fargo’s Internet services group. “Typically documents are stored in a bunch of boxes in a garage or basement, which is inherently unsafe.”

Wells Fargo employs a team of anthropologists to study customers’ behavior and discovered through its research that improving document storage is an unmet need, said Smith.

“More and more documents are now available and are sent electronically," said Smith. “There’s a real opportunity to make it easier to find documents and to ensure safety in case of some sort of disaster.”

Since the service is being offered by Wells Fargo, vSafe will have layers of security to prevent customers’ data from falling into the wrong hands, said Smith. As an added layer of security, customers can sign up for a second level of authentication in which the customer gets a RSA secure ID token, with a one-time password that changes every 60 seconds.

“VSafe is behind all of the layers of security built up for wellsfargo.com," said Smith, noting the bank has been offering services online for the past 13 years. “Just like anything we do online, it's subject to all the rules and regulations of the financial services industry.”

Still, fraud experts said a service like vSafe could make customers more vulnerable to identity theft, even with all the security.

“I’m a fan of backing up sensitive information and data. I don’t necessarily support the concept of storing them online,’’ said Jon McDowall, chief executive of Bettendorf, Iowa-based Fraud Resource Group and a fraud investigator for two decades. “We’re seeing a clear trend of moving away from personal identity fraud to online fraud. When you see these services taking hold, knowing that those are the areas fraudsters are focusing on it does concern me some.”

In the past, McDowall said identity theft was typically done by going through someone’s mail or garbage or stealing from desks. But the Internet has spawned cyber fraud, which is harder to catch and could happen years after the information or documents are stolen.

While financial firms do have top-notch security, it doesn’t mean they are a 100% safe. A recent study by University of California Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology found that banks and telephone companies top the list of targets for identity thieves. The study analyzed 88,000 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission over a three month period in 2006.

According to Wells Fargo’s Smith, in addition to storing sensitive documents, customers of Wells Fargo will have access to their bank statement and other financial documents through the service. Those who don’t have accounts at Wells Fargo can still use the service.

To get documents like your passport of Social Security card into vSafe, you would need to first scan it to make an electronic copy. Customers can get even more space, but for a fee. For three gigabytes of storage it will cost $9.95 a month. For six gigabytes, its $14.95. Smith said the six gigabyte storage will likely be for customers who are storing photos or videos online with vSafe. He even said one employee in the beta trial is backing up an entire library of iTunes music on vSafe.