Here’s a fun exercise: Make a list of every valuable document, record, memo, and photograph your company has piled into storage boxes somewhere. Now make a list of catastrophes that could destroy such cherished papers. Mix and match.

  • Sensitive medical records gone in a fire.
  • Company research documents rendered unreadable in a flood.
  • Contracts chunked in the trash by absent-minded employees.
  • White papers gone brown with the slow inexorable march of time.
  • 15 years of IRS-ready audit reports made food for a pack of pink pulp-thirsty paper-eating moths (hey—it could happen!).

Storing these online is the first step to security, and the first step to online backup is Technifax’s digital archival and retrieval service.

It’s a lesson Dallas County learned the hard way in late May, after a busted water main flooded one of the county’s downtown records buildings. According to the Dallas Morning News :

The computer disaster that a consultant warned Dallas County about two years ago arrived Tuesday when a break in a water main disabled its computer systems, crippling operations for almost the entire county government.

The 2008 consultant’s report warned the county that it needed a backup plan for its computer system in case of a disaster — an off-site location to keep county operations up and running. But no action was taken on that advice.

The consequences were felt by all departments Tuesday, as staff resorted to pen, paper, radios and telephones to handle critical tasks such as making sure the right prisoners were booked into the jail and released from it.

The county’s criminal justice system nearly ground to a halt, as paper processing from another era led to lengthy delays — keeping some prisoners in jail longer than normal.

“We’re doing a lot of stuff the old-fashioned way,” Sheriff Lupe Valdez said.

[...] A consultant hired to assess the computer systems gave the county its lowest rating in 2008 in seven out of eight categories. The county did poorly in three key areas: core infrastructure, technical support and risk assessment. One of the most alarming findings in the report by Miami-based eGov Consulting Services was that the county could not recover critical functions after a disaster.

And it’s a lesson that could we could’ve helped them easily avoid.

Online, off-site backups are already popular with many businesses around Dallas. But what can you do with all those years and years of physical files you have stored away somewhere in a closet that remain vulnerable to disaster and loss? We can help you digitize, organize, and store those as well.

We use a paperless document imaging solution that preserves documents infinitely in top quality. That means no more overloaded file drawers in cramped document closets. No more hours spent searching for important information stashed away (somewhere) years ago. No more scanning faded and time-worn reports. No more worries about what could go wrong in a disaster.

It’s safe, secure, and a source of invaluable peace of mind for your business. Contact our document archival and retrieval experts for more information. There’s no reason to risk losing it all.