Electronic Archiving

What was your first thought when seeing the title of this article? Was it, "Oh, the IT department takes care of that." You are correct. IT departments do tend to back-up their back-ups in case the first back-up didn't back-up the back-up that they were supposed to back-up. Well, you get the picture. No wonder servers are costing a lot these days. In all fairness, our IT department colleagues have their job cut out for them.

But the kind of electronic archiving I'm talking about is the kind that gives you the ability to read what you wrote-whether it is in Word, Excel, or any other application in Microsoft Office-10 or 20 years from now. Of course, you are probably asking, "why would anyone want to read this stuff?" My answer is simple: because what you wrote might have an effect on business process, might "prove" something, or its future accessibility might be an edict from someone at the top.

Here's an example. Today's research companies create a lot of electronic records. But they still have to print out their Word or Excel documents and paste them into a book, along with their hand-written records, in order to "prove" when they performed the various tests on that next new pharmaceutical. These pages are usually in a bound book to show the order in which tests occurred, because it is kind of tough to cut out a page and insert another. This analog record of research is crucial to the company if there should ever arise a patent dispute. If this bound book were in electronic form, could we be sure to have the legacy technology around to read it in 20 years? Heck, my grandchildren will wonder why we even needed those big clunky desktop computers back in 2007! And did you know that the newest version of Office saves Word documents as .DOCX files, not as the .DOC files with which we've all become so familiar? You can open up a previous version of Word, but don't try to open it up going backwards after you saved it in the latest version.

An alternative to keeping up with forward migrations in software and technology is to take the electronic documents deemed worthy of keeping (that's an interesting process in itself) and run them through a TIFF maker, or "petrify" them, as we call it. "Wait," you say, "Isn't this another digital image I may not be able to read 10 years from now?" The great thing about these TIFFs is that you can print them to a medium that has a 500-year LE (life expectancy). This long-lived medium is analog and can be read with the naked eye using no other technology than a magnifying glass.

By petrifying your documents today, you remove the risk of non-readability in 10, or even 20 years.

By now, you know my usual ending. If you want to know more, write me at mzecy@americanmicrokc.com and say 'petrify me' in the subject. I'll see if we can shed more light on this.

Mark A. Zecy