Datawitness Online Ltd. Articles Feed

Take Your File Archiving To A New Level of Security and Safety

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:11 -0800

In a previous article explaining the differences between archiving and backup, I mentioned two definitions of archiving. First, archive it because the government says you have to. Second, archive it to protect yourself in the event of future legal dispute. To these important reasons for archiving records off-site, let’s add two more. Archive it to make your office more efficient and to create peace of mind. Let’s look at efficiency first.

Studies of office workflow efficiency repeatedly show the pitfalls of managing paper files. Here is a small sample of the many statistics on how managing paper attacks your bottom line by draining staff time away from revenue-producing tasks.

Paper costs you time and money, over and over…

• The initial cost of filing a document including supplies and staff time is 20 cents per sheet.
• The average time to retrieve a paper document from a file is 5-7 minutes.
• The average time to re-file a paper document is 3 minutes.
• Executives spend 7.4% of their time looking for lost or misplaced documents.
• 25% of misplaced documents and files are never found.
• Recreating a lost document costs between $120 and $250.

A careful approach to archiving can slash the time your staff spends managing, locating, filing, re-filing paper and recreating lost paper records. When a file falls out of active use and spends all its time taking up space in a file cabinet or storage box, then consider this option. Convert the complete contents of aging files from paper to digital format by scanning into high quality image files like PDF and TIFF formats. Storing the files in a secure archive maintained by an independent third party vendor guarantees the authenticity and integrity of the scanned documents will be immune to attack and beyond reproach.

Archiving need not be limited to paper-based records. Digitally created files increasingly capture and are the default resting place of important information related to business matters and transactions. Digital files are often saved and shared without ever being printed on paper. Forward thinking organizations are archiving key native digital files in PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats and completely eliminating the steps of printing and filing paper from their workflows.

Whether you archive converted paper files or digital files, you immediately start saving time. You will know exactly where files are located and be able to find and retrieve them in seconds.

“Documents, marked “highly confidential,” were strewn across nearly empty streets.”

This leads into my second point on achieving peace of mind through archiving. Simply put, you’ll never misplace or lose an archived file. When files absolutely cannot be lost or misplaced, you’ll never experience the gut wrenching situation of needing to find and produce vital records then discovering you can’t locate what you need and having to scramble to recreate them.

By archiving your records off-site you reduce the risks to paper records posed by numerous potential threats. You prevent damage by fire, water, or extreme weather. An entirely preventable and current example is the situation in Houston on September 13, 2008, where in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, paper documents marked “highly confidential” littered downtown streets.

Archiving also forestalls malicious actions originating outside your office like theft. You also stymie internal threats like intentional destruction by employees who are disgruntled or trying to eliminate or cover tracks on transactions or communications which they know or anticipate could create trouble for themselves or the organization.

Datawitness goes a step further to protect you.

At Datawitness, we separate ourselves from other archiving solutions by adding an extra layer of safety and security to record storage. Our archiving method prints a snapshot of every archived file onto long-lasting microfilm to lock the content of a document into a tamperproof version. Legal opinions suggest images of documents recreated from microfilm will be accepted as evidence by courts as a version of an original document holding all the integrity and authenticity of a paper version.

When your digital file is backed up by a tangible, physical copy on microfilm, both digital and microfilm versions are supported by Datawitness’s digital fingerprinting process. A digital file at its core is represented numerically. The underlying numerical data of a file gives it a unique identity which we record along with a time and date stamp to create metadata (basically data describing data) for every record archived in your account.

The combination of digital and physical file versions, the digital fingerprint metadata, and the fact of data being held at arm’s length by an independent third party provides you a defensible version of a record. You no longer have to expose your important and vulnerable papers and digital files to the risks of your office or paid storage. You can also reduce your reliance on labour-intensive backup processes.

If an efficient, secure method for storing documents, files, and records would help your organization preserve its vital information and put your mind at ease, call us now at 604-273-8894 to get a free, no obligation demonstration of how easily you can start off-site archiving today.

Guide to Creating an Environmentally Friendly Office

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:17 -0800

Greening Your Law Firm: A Practical Guide to Creating an Environment-Friendly Law Office is a comprehensive article by lawyer Janice Mucalov. Datawitness would like to draw your attention to this insightful article regarding the “greening of your office”. The subject matter of Ms. Mucalov’s article is based on law-firms but her advice clearly is applicable to other types of business and professional offices.

Although an office cannot be completely “paperless” there are certain fundamental building blocks to an environmentally-friendlier office. These blocks include the elimination of paper as a storage medium and converting closed files to electronic or microfilm storage. Datawitness can help you reduce the paper stored in your office with secured online archiving.

Give us a call, what have you got to lose but gain secured offsite storage.

What is the difference between Archiving and Backup?

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:15 -0800

We’ve noticed confusion among people due to a blurring of the boundary between archiving and backup in descriptions of services offered by vendors. I’m going to draw a clear line between backup and archiving to enable you to tell the difference and judge the accuracy of statements from vendors claiming to do both.

I’ll say up front that Datawitness falls clearly on the archiving side of the boundary. After you’ve read the article and know that archiving is what you need, we’ll gladly show you how our services give you secure long-term storage of important records.

The differences between archiving and backup exist due to the reasons that data is stored separately from computers and file servers used in the regular course of business.

A backup stores a snapshot of active data in bulk, for restoration in the event of deletion, corruption, or loss. Backups are designed to enable you to copy your data back to a computer and pick up where you left off. For security and efficiency reasons, backup data may be encrypted and compressed. Restoring a backup to a hard drive takes time to decompress and transfer the large volume of data involved.

Archiving has different purposes and can be defined from three points of view. Records management defines archiving as long-term preservation of records in an unalterable form. Information technologists define archiving as storing data off production systems. And from a legal perspective, archiving is keeping records as long the government requires and to protect against future liabilities arising from disputes and lawsuits.

Ideally, archiving should satisfy all three definitions. You want to lock in data for the long-term on a dedicated archiving system and be able to find very specific pieces of it when you need them.

What Is The Lifespan?

A second difference is the lifespan of backup and archived data.

Backups are temporary and have short lifespans measured in days. They are frequently overwritten or deleted as time passes and updated snapshots of backup files are stored.

Archived files have a longer lifespan. Archiving selectively stores final versions of closed or inactive files for a period usually measured in years as defined by regulations or accepted practices for an industry or profession. The files are stored uncompressed and fully readable in their original format.

Not all files need to be archived and not all archived files need to be retained for the same length of time. Different industries and professions have different requirements. For example, our education clients in Ontario and British Columbia must store student records for 25 and 55 years respectively.

How Easy Is Access?

A third key difference is how easily you can access your data at the file level. Backup systems focus bulk transfer of large numbers of files. The options for searching and navigating through a backup to select and retrieve individual files tend to be limited or slow and clumsy.

Archives are built for selective retrieval on the file level. When you need to locate specific files, you should be able to target searches to return small numbers of close matches. Then you can find and retrieve exactly what you are looking for accurately and quickly.

Where Do The Files Go?

A final difference is whether files stay on computers in day to day use. Backup files are still in active use and changing. Archived files are removed completely from the computer you use on a day to day basis. Hard drive space is not the issue it used to be so people are tempted to retain copies of files on computers used everyday. However, doing so can’t be considered archiving for several reasons.

First, and most important, files can be lost or deleted a number of ways. On a purely mechanical level, a drive can fail and files can be corrupted without any human intervention or error. Second, access to the computer or drive holding files may not be controlled or tracked. Insecure access controls enable the third issue, which is the opportunity for tampering which includes changing or deleting files with bad intent.

A true archive removes files from the routine workflow on computers in day to day use and places them in safe, separate, yet accessible and searchable storage. Larger businesses with resources for staff and equipment may have the capability of keeping archives in house using systems built specifically for archiving.

How You Can Archive Your Records

Many businesses and organizations can afford neither the people nor the hardware for dedicated archiving. And if they could bear the cost they may not have the need for a full-blown system when an economical outsourced option is available.

That is where a service like Datawitness StoreIt enters the picture. StoreIt can fill the gap between heavy-weight enterprise systems and no archiving at all.

You may have seen statistics about how major record loss affects SMBs. Whether the loss occurs through natural disaster, fire, theft, or accidental damage, many businesses simply can’t recover and go under.

So whether you are compelled to archive by an outside force like regulations or want peace of mind by protecting ongoing business viability in an unpredictable world, we have an archiving solution that you can access via the Internet. If you want to see how easy secure, off-site archiving can be we’ll show you how it works in minutes. Request a demo online or call us at 604-273-8894 to get started.

Common Archiving Terms

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:29 -0800

Archiving is such an archaic word which conjures up images of old, dark, dusty rooms in the basements of churches or museums which no-one really wants to go into.
Wikipedia’s entry about archiving says “An archive refers to a collection of historical records, and also refers to the location in which these records are kept.”

We can use that as a basis for our mini-glossary of common terms used when archiving records. We will look at data handling from both the paper side and the digital side to help us become familiar with records management on the whole.

Artifacts

Unwelcome features of an image, like speckles or digital noise, usually introduced by some scanner hardware limitation, or use of image processing techniques.

Auto Document Feeder (ADF)

A motorized addition to scanners which feeds pages into a scanner when required, enabling unattended scanning.

CCD

Charge-coupled device, the electronic component (sensor) most commonly used in scanners to capture light reflected from a document, which is then processed into digital information, sent to your PC, and displayed as the scanned image.

Channel

One component of a colour model for a digital color image (RGB uses red, green and blue for example). Channels are handy for adjusting images. You can manipulate channels independently, for example increasing the brightness of the red channel to add more red to the image.

Contrast

The range between the darkest and lightest parts of an image. Part of the trick of improving scan quality is increasing contrast without losing detail in the brightest and darkest parts of the image.

Descreening

An option included in many scanner drivers that can help remove unpleasant dot patterns from newsprint or magazine images.

DPI

Dots per inch. See resolution

Filters

Tools that allow you to apply effects to your images. These range from conventional options such as Sharpen, which are intended to improve the quality of an image, to more artistic special effects such as Emboss or Mosaic.

Gamma

The contrast around the midtone of an image. Adjust the gamma and you can alter the brightness of an image without drastically affecting shadows or highlights.

Greyscale

An image consisting of shades of grey, with no color.

Halftone

A printing technique which uses patterns of dots to create the illusion of a continuous tone image.

Highlights

The lightest parts of an image.

Life-cycle

All phases in the life of an object or file. An object life-cycle is determined by assigning information such as when it is created, how it is identified, how it is classified, when it is archived, how long it is preserved, and when it should be destroyed.

Metadata

Data that describes data. Metadata is used to facilitate the understanding, use and management of data. The metadata required for effective data management varies with the type of data and context of use. Metadata is generally embedded into the data it is describing.

Midtones

The area of an image between the highlights and the shadows.

Mime

A file is identified based on the MIME encoding system. The MIME type has become the de facto standard for identifying content on the Internet. For example, in order to identify the type of attachment sent in an e-mail message, its MIME type is embedded in the message header.

Moire

The unpleasant dot pattern that can sometimes occur if you scan a magazine picture and didn’t use the De-screening option.

OCR

Optical Character Recognition is the process of analyzing the shapes on a scanned image, recognizing individual characters, and eventually converting them to editable text.

Pixel

Short for ‘picture element’, a pixel is the smallest dot that is used to make up an image.

Pixels per inch (PPI)

Pixels per inch (PPI) or pixel density is a measurement of the resolution of a computer display, related to the size of the display in inches and the total number of pixels in the horizontal and vertical directions. This measurement is often referred to as dots per inch, though that measurement more accurately refers to the resolution of a computer printer.

Preview

A low quality, but fast scan, useful to get a quick idea of how a scanned image is going to look. With TWAIN software and many scanners, this is part of the set-up process to allow you to select a specific portion of a document.

Resolution

A measurement of the quality of an image, usually expressed in terms of the number of dots per inch (dpi) both horizontally and vertically.

Retention

A comprehensive instruction covering the disposition of records to assure that they are retained for as long as necessary based on their administrative, fiscal, legal, and historic value.

Shadows

The darkest parts of an image.

TWAIN

Nothing to do with turgid, radio-friendly country rock music! TWAIN (aka Technology Without An Interesting Name!)is the standard means by which a PC can send commands to and retrieve data from an external device, most commonly a scanner or digital camera. Most advanced graphics programs support TWAIN, and so will work with your scanner immediately.

WORM

Write Once, Read Many. Meaning something is created on a medium such as a tape, or a roll of film, but is accessed to read/view repeatedly.

Keeping Records Safe

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:00 -0800

Records Management is defined as “The field of management responsible for the efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposition of records, including the processes for capturing and maintaining evidence of and information about business activities and transactions in the form of records”. That translates into an expensive statement for most people looking for a solution to storing data they must keep for various reasons.

Vaulting Paper

A simpler definition for records management “protect yourself and maintain proof”. In business, this means “keep a LOT of paper around” and that means storage. At the moment the paper storage industry is booming due to the fact that people have moved into the electronic age. Despite the promise of paperless offices, inexpensive computers and printers are now generating massive amounts of paper to document activities. But there are few solutions for true records storage given the new volumes of data. So although we have increased our records volumes, we have inherited the old standard of paper storage which makes for a mess.

All Change Comes With a Price

Digital data storage solutions five years ago were costly. It was cheaper and easier to print a page for 0.30¢ and store it in a box. To quote Bob Dylan “…The times, they are a changin’…” Records Management however has begun to spread its wings. With the cost per GB of storage now measured in pennies and users being able to purchase a terabyte of storage for a couple hundred bucks, it will only get cheaper.

The tables have turned. Paper storage is now the costly alternative. Compared to digital storage, paper storage is getting expensive and time consuming even using the biggest and presumably most efficient document storage companies. The cost of storing paper is pushing SMB’s and personal record keepers to find an electronic records storage solution. Laws have started to catch up with technology. Records can now be created and maintained in a digital format only, within guidelines. This is good news for us all, but how do we make it work? Of paramount concern is security, so secure records storage is the main criteria when examining solutions for long-term records storage. What constitutes security? Well, redundancy, access control, disaster recovery policy, technology proofing.

The Digital Revolution

With digital data storage costs going through the floor, 50% of the paper storage problem has been solved. However the other 50%, security, was not solved. We used to have to protect our data on paper from the elements. Paper burns, rots, stains, fades, and disintegrates. Safe storage of such a fragile material has always been a challenge.

A digital file does not suffer directly from the elements, but does have its own risks. A digital file can be rendered useless by a magnet, an unstable power current, defective hard disks, and viruses. And digital storage is susceptible to technology obsolescence. Remember the 4 ¼ floppy or the 3 ½ diskette? So as an SMB, where can you look for a solution to the problem of costly paper storage of important records, AND digital storage of important records?

A 100% Solution

Datawitness marries online technology with offline integrity, by bringing microfilm storage to electronic records management. Who would have thought an “old world technology” would solve a “new world problem”? We did it and gave you the best of both worlds: electronic-format and hard-format.

Datawitness is the only viable solution when long-term digital records storage is required. We are the best solution because we can store records onto microfilm, yet keep them available digitally, so you can still reference them if required. You pay for what you store, and you pay for it only once. No recurring costs. Digital Storage for 35 years, Microfilm for 100 years +.