Digitally archiving files is one of those low effort tasks that has huge results. If done properly it will save your stress levels, financial state, and even your company. In order to see the logic behind it, let’s start at the beginning.
Digitizing is a topic all on its own. To keep it short though, any company of any size will benefit from converting their paper documents to digital ones. Digital copies have the capabilities of being tracked. Digital copies do not take up space in paper file folders in cabinets or on desks and are environmentally friendly. Digital copies can be saved to a central location which the user accesses from anywhere at any time; paper copies must be in multiple locations at once, where each of the users is. Digital files are easier to access by people who are not always sitting at the same desk or even the same office. Remote employees and colleagues from partner companies can also be given access from their offices.
Consider this, an employee completes a project, the results are printed, and the file is closed. Three years later that employee moves onto another company or even out of the country. Five years after this a similar project comes along and the question is raised “What did we do the first time?” Well the answers are all on file, but which file? That was eight years ago. What name did the employee save it under? What file did she use? Even worse, which computer did she use? Archiving files avoids scenarios such as this. Properly archived files act quite similar to a library. Everything can be sorted by date, time, topic, or whatever is most meaningful to you and your company. The files get catalog sorting order and are put on a “shelf” until they are further needed.
Your archive is not organized the same way your active documents are, and that makes a huge difference. You should not store current files the same way you store ones which have no immediate use – “immediate” depending on how long your team works on a document. The first step to archiving everything digital is to determine or overhaul your active file system. What categories do document types fall into? How do you search for these currently? Is there an agreed upon naming convention and standard practice for organizing these files on named machines? It may be that a little spring cleaning is in order. If your archive is your library, every file given the same data-rich treatment, then your current content is closer to the structure of your own department breakdown. Luckily, both archives and active directories can benefit from similar techniques: sticking to the naming convention, dating all of the files, including metadata for retrieval based on keywords, etc. No matter where you’re storing something, these best practices will streamline storage, retrieval, sorting, all of it!
A version of this article was originally published as The Logic Behind Properly Archiving Files Off-site by Mike Mineo on October 1st, 2013.
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