File Storage

[bruce hall]

boundary stuff FOREVER. I usually rid myself of the construction plans when I say to myself "I've had this crap long enough. Goodbye." And that can vary from 5 to 10 years.

[Ian Wilson]

Awhile back, I posted regarding an opinion from the Legislative Analyst on statutes of limitations to liabilities for land surveyors. I can't find the opinion, now!

It was a great read and left guidelines for storage of files.

Does anyone have a copy of the opinion?

.

[Steve Martin]

Leg Council Opinion Attached

[E_Page]

i THINK THIS IS THE ONE iAN IS REFERRING TO. (CAD case, sorry)



Edit: Steve got to it while I was looking.

[PLS7393]

I think Steve's computer is faster than yours Evan, lol!

[E_Page]

I can't blame it on the computer. I think Steve is probably better organized. I save lots of useful stuff and then put it where I won't lose it. The problem is, I have so many of those "won't lose it" places that I lose track of where they all are.

I gotta get back to work. Now where did I put that file....

[land butcher]

At some class I took years ago, the instructor worked in the aerospace industry.
He said 7 years after a project was finished the files were trashed. He also stated that this needs to be done at least once a year, if not the president of discarding is thrown out and can bite you in court.

[Jim Frame]

"He also stated that this needs to be done at least once a year, if not the president of discarding is thrown out and can bite you in court."

I had to read that a couple of times before I got rid of the image of a guy -- the President of Discarding, angry at being thrown out of something -- biting someone in court.

It reads better if you substitute "precedent" for "president."

.

[land butcher]

Thanks, It didnt look right to me, but spell check liked it and I was tired.

[mpallamary]

What I have been doing, admittedly rather slowly, is to scan and store the old files. At the end of the day, hard disc storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. Once they are electronically stored, they are easily retrieved. Because a lot of my older surveys were done on paper with a lot of hand calculations, I find them ever more important. Just today, we resurrected an old job from 1985. We did our calculations on the old HP-67, with the plug in printer as I recall. The print outs were on the heat sensitive paper. We are manually entering the data into an ascii format so it can be recovered.

As many of our older maps were hand drawn, we are scanning them and then placing them in our GIS database. The older vellums and paper are corroding and beginning to show signs of age. We also strive to retain any unrecorded notes and records as they are oftentimes the best evidence of where lines were run.

I posed the question of how long should I hold on to the records to my accountant and he said anywhere from 5 to 7 years. He explained that as a general rule of business, at the end of the day, your biggest exposure as a business person is the threat of the IRS. If anyone is interested in those statutes of limitations, consider looking at:

http://www.wwwebtax.com/audits/statute_ ... ations.htm

Good luck all. This is a fine topic.

PS, get a scanner and scan down a few files a day!

[Jim Frame]

"What I have been doing, admittedly rather slowly, is to scan and store the old files. At the end of the day, hard disc storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. Once they are electronically stored, they are easily retrieved."

Scanning paper files is something I'd like to do, but I just haven't worked up the energy for it yet. One of these days...

Once it's all digital, however, you're not done. Storing the files on a hard disk attached to your desktop, and/or on your in-house server, and/or on an external drive connected to one computer or another in your office is convenient and inexpensive, but it's not enough. Unless you implement a plan -- preferably one that operates without regular human intervention -- to store the files somewhere offsite, your data will be vulnerable to theft or destruction from fire or natural disaster.

Web-based cloud storage is relatively inexpensive and pretty easy to implement these days. For my small office, a once-weekly upload of important files -- generally from 1 to 3 GB (compressed size much lower) -- takes from an hour to several hours over my DSL connection to Amazon's S3 server farms. It runs starting at 11:00 p.m. every Saturday, so I rarely see a network slowdown. And I can relax knowing that my data are housed in multiple locations managed by a company in the business of keeping data safe.

.

[mpallamary]

Excellent recommendation and that is a great idea! We have multiple backup processes also. I have also shipped a hard drive with my data to a relative sho lives far away. She thought I was crazy but as I told her, well we have fires and earthquakes out here!
Thanks for the post and your suggestion is a great one!