Document freeze drying is an attempt made to restore books, art, keepsakes, and other important documents. It is used for other things as well like coffee. Similarly, NASA uses freeze-dried food for their astronauts. It is the perfect solution for restoring things that are important to you and works best with water damaged items.

Document freeze drying works by freezing the document solidly. What it does is lock the structure of the document into position. This is why it works so well with water damage. If your document is soaked through and crumbled, a document freeze drying professional will figure it into the shape you request and freeze it. The freezing of a document that is already wet and condensing takes a little longer. It must be kept in an area with a temperature of -40 degrees Celsius or colder. This helps pull vapors from the document so that the document is dried while it is being frozen. A vacuum pump is used to suck the air out of the document with very low pressure. The document is also heated to promote the expulsion of water stuck inside the document.

Does document freeze drying sound like a complex process? In a way, it is. When my grandmother's house was flooded a few years ago, I had a lot of boxes stored in the garage. Some of those boxes had letters that my great grandparents had written to me before I was old enough to remember. Their lives were written down for me so that I would know where they had been and what they had gone through. Some of those letters talked about them coming to California during the dustbowl as kids with their parents. The letters have no real value to anyone outside of my family but they were very important to me. I had never considered protecting them, but simply filed them in a box and stored them at my grandma's place until I could figure out what to do with them. When her house got flooded, including the part of the garage where my boxes were stored, I was devastated. Half of it is because there was so much work to be done inside the house and the other half because I had lost my most valuable possession - the letters from my great grandparents. Thankfully, I learned of this process called document freeze drying. It was document freeze drying that saved them.

A friend actually suggested document freeze drying to me as he had been through a similar situation when his shop was caught on fire. He recommended a local document freeze drying company to me and I went without much hope of being able to restore the letters. Not only were they restored, the company protected them for me in the event that they are subjected to flood again - the letters were encased and safe. I actually hugged the guy who handed my letters back to me after the document freeze drying restoration process.