The estimated shelf-life of an optical disc is 2 to 5 years.
We scan documents. Getting those cumbersome paper files into a streamlined electronic format does wonders for record-keeping efficiency, but it’s only half the battle.
Oftentimes, we deliver our product on CD or DVD. They are easy to burn and deliver, whether in person or by mail. But these discs are not perfect. They will degrade and, as such, they were not intended to be a long-term storage solution. They may be great for backups of household data, but you want a more robust solution for your business.
At the very least, get it on a computer.
By putting all of the data on a local hard drive, you make the data accessible anytime you turn on the computer, and eliminate the need to keep your discs nearby. As compact as these discs are, they still take up valuable space on your desk. You don’t want to be flipping through CDs or DVDs looking for the information you need, firing up the optical drive, and browsing through your converted documents in Windows Explorer. The purpose of the whole process is efficiency, and why go so far and not take that next step.
Your hard drive responds much faster than having to navigate through a disc drive. That’s how your documents truly become instantaneous. Further, if the contents of the disc are on your computer, naturally, you could store years of records whereas a disc might store just one year. And viewing all of your documents in a hierarchical tree view beats labeled discs on your desk any day.
Get them on a network.
You have the documents on your computer and what a difference it makes. Now, to locate a document, there’s no fumbling through clutter on your desk to identify the disc you need to load. Not sure what year an account file you’re looking for was created? Now you don’t have to pop in three or four discs browsing for it.
The next step beyond moving your data off the disc is to get it on a networked server or workstation. If you have even three people accessing documents in your office, by making the documents accessible to any one of them with the click of a mouse yields untold benefits for productivity.
Also, wherever you find a network, you find backups. If you have the infrastructure of a network built, chances are that your IT staff runs regular backups of the system. Gone are the days of transferring data to some media built for longevity. With resources and equipment to back up massive amounts of data in a few hours, we now live in an age where backups are made daily and incrementally. Even our backups are fast, versatile, and accessible.
Use a Content Management System
If you’ve had files delivered on disc, then you’ve heard us talk about content management systems. You could call Windows Explorer a content management system. You can browse or search for files. You can rename them. You can open them for viewing or editing. But with the advent of document conversion comes the need for a more thorough and feature-rich software.
Content management systems, at the very least, will provide a means of indexing your documents so you can find them based on the data fields that are relevant to your process. If you retrieve documents by year, client name, docket number, or receipt amount, those fields will be indexed and searchable. A combination of three index fields is usually all that’s necessary to find any document.
Content management systems also provide tracking. When your documents are accessible to your employees, there’s no way to know who viewed what or at what time. There’s no way to know what they changed or where they left the status of the document. Content management systems can provide all of this. Our recommendation, CNG-SAFE by Cabinet NG, will tell you who accessed any document and even provide the previous versions if you need to return to an older copy.
Workflows can be set up in CNG-SAFE to ensure that if a document that gets scanned needs to be processed through a number of employees and get archived in a specific location, it will happen. Permissions are thoroughly customizable. Not only is limited access ensured, the chain of custody is also specifically prescribed and adhered to.
It’s inevitable. If you’re using CDs and DVDs to access your data, there will be a failure. Get the data where it belongs-on the network.