The most common way to store information is still paper documents because of the vast archives of paper still filling offices that have not yet been digitized. Paper documents have the same requirements as mentioned above and are probably the hardest to re-create. Just imagine having a business and all of the paper documents that are accumulated for the past 10 years of doing business. Employee records, accounting information, contracts, etc. and the place where you have all of these documents burns down. How would you re-create all of these documents? What would happen if for some reason you then found yourself in a law suit over a contract that was destroyed? You don't want to leave yourself or your business vulnerable to these types of problems and you probably wouldn't even remember all of the documents that would need to be recreated.

Fortunately the computer age has moved us away from these types of problems and has given us solutions that can remedy the problems that come with paper files such as storage space and vulnerability to disaster.

Solutions: Purchase a scanner or hire a company that can scan all of your documents into digital formats such as TIFF or PDF. This will reduce the space needed to operate your business, make accessing and sharing these documents much simpler and give you up to date options for safely storing your personal or business information.

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CD's and DVD's are a great way deliver information to business associates, potential customer and existing customers, but they are not a very good way to store data for long periods of time. CD's and DVD's have a short life span, typically about 2 to 3 years and unlike a computer system or hard drive give the user no indication that they are going bad. You will simply go to use one and you will not be able to access the information any longer.

Tape backups have proven too problematic at best. We have worked with clients that have had tape backups running for months before they found out that nothing was actually being written to the tape. If you are one of the lucky ones that actually has a tape backup that works restoring to the computer when you need to can be very time consuming and problematic in itself. Another drawback to tape backups is that they are not incremental, meaning that you have to copy all of the information onto the tape every time and the data is not encrypted.

Rotating your backup tapes offsite can also be problematic and expensive. Tapes for your backup device are expensive and having the number of tapes required to implement an offsite rotation procedure can cost thousands of dollars. Also transporting your tapes offsite can have its own set of problems. Typically the data on a tape is not encrypted and if it were stolen on its way offsite the thief would have access to all of the information on the tape.

Storing your computer files on a hard drive is probably the safest way to store your information safely for long periods of time. This makes accessing sharing the files easy and has been proven to greatly speed up businesses productivity. Computers and hard drives will typically give you indications of having problems before they completely die on you as well. You also have several options for protecting your information on a computers hard drive such as anti-virus software, firewalls and even managed services that will monitor your computers and network for potential problems.

The downside to storing all of your information on your hard drive is that in many cases your computer system and its components are only warranted for 3 years and even with an extended warranty you will typically only be covered for 5 years and the warranty does nothing about covering your information. The big problem here is much of your information has a 7 year retention requirement. This leaves quite a gap between what you have to do and what your computer will do.

Solutions: The first solution is simple; always migrate your information to newer systems before the old ones crash. This includes servers and since most businesses do not have crystal balls you can only hope that the computer will do everything the manufacturer says it will. The second solution is a lot more practical and cost effective especially when you consider the tech time involved in maintaining multiple systems on a network. You need to hire a company that does this for you. Let someone whose business is built around maintaining and migrating data handle this. In most cases this will only cost you pennies a day and they will keep multiple copies of your data and safeguard it from unforeseen problems.

NOTE: Beware of companies that don't have your best interests in mind. Anyone can put a computer and storage space together and offer these types of services. Throughout the industry we have run into service providers that are no more than college students storing your information in their dorm room. Our advice; check out any one that you plan to store your data with thoroughly. Make sure that they offer features such as automatic data replication and encryption for your data that you control the encryption key for. They should also have their primary and secondary servers in different location to protect your data from natural disaster and localized problems such as power outages.

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Fire proof safes are widely used for archiving records. Something to consider when using fire proof safes is the internal temperature ratings. If you store your data on CD's. DVD's or tapes typically the internal temperature rating of a fire proof safe is much greater than these types of media will withstand.

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