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Every day at 9:00 am sharp your company staff begins to once again flood through the entrance to get to their workstations, not even five minutes in there are documents being printed, copied, and then copied a few more times. Given time, your office turns into one big paper recycling plant with documents everywhere and not enough storage space. Here are some easy document storage options for your business.

Digital storage

Many large companies have turned to digital storage considering the fact a single flash drive can hold more documents than countless filing cabinets. Digital storage allows you to save office space and improve the accessibility of your documents.

A single one-terabyte hard drive can store more information than a whole warehouse filled with filing cabinets. As data storage becomes cheaper and cheaper the archiving of physical copies will soon be a thing of the past.

New data storage systems such as erasure coding storage allow for more space-efficient yet secure data storage options. Erasure coding uses only ¼ of the amount of storage that RAID 6 uses since rather than mirroring a partition, it breaks down data into multiple chunks and stores them separately to prevent total corruption which leaves data unrecoverable.

We know what you’re thinking, “it’s a bit late, I already have stacks of paper copies”, but fear not, many companies including Perfect Retention offer document conversion services. We can scan your physical documents and convert them into digital formats.

Offsite storage

Offsite storage is the preferred choice of many businesses who want their documents out of their office to save space yet still close enough to be accessible to employees. Storing your documents in an off-site storage facility will not only save space in your office, it will also help protect your documents from a wide variety of hazards that could destroy your sensitive information.

Most offsite storage companies also offer document conversion services as an add-on to storage plans to make it easier for you and your employees to access information remotely.

Make sure any remote-access software you use to view your sensitive information comes with high-end security features such as impenetrable firewalls and effective virus scans to ensure your secrets remain for your eyes only.

Onsite storage

While highly inefficient and very costly, onsite storage is still a valid choice especially for smaller-scale companies with fewer documents which need to be stored.

When all your documents are stored on-site you’ll need to ensure you maintain proper records management to keep everything nice and neat. No employee wants to spend hours searching through dozens of filing cabinets just to find a single file.

If you decide to go with onsite storage then make sure you allocate a large room as your document archives, you may think a fifty square meter room is more than enough storage space for a few folders but in a few years you’ll be overwhelmed when you see how little space is left available for incoming documents.