The key is a long-term storage policy that's planned and executed with legal and company goals in mind. The plan should address every possible problem, from IT staff turnover to technology changes to data-retention requirements. The human element is often overlooked. When IT staffers change jobs, for instance, important data might get lost in the shuffle, especially if records haven't been well-documented or if the data's physical location hasn't been tracked. On the technology side, you need to select a storage medium--tape, CD or DVD, for instance--that will last long term and is easy to use when it's time to access your archives.
Organizations should have at least one IT person whose job or duties include managing archived data. This "go-to" long-term storage-manager position, however, has been the exception rather than the rule in most companies. But that could soon change. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other privacy-related government regulations are driving organizations to come up with well-orchestrated and managed archival strategies to better protect and preserve their long-term data. Your long-term storage person should work closely with your legal department, as well as with individual department heads, to determine their data-retention requirements. For instance, if the accounting department needs to hold financial data for seven years, then you'd want to set up a deletion schedule so that archived data remains manageable.
There are several alternatives available. For email the accepted standard is pure ASCII. That is, a text-only format. While this may seem primitive, it will last. Further, it serves many purposes adequately. Any documents that one wants to keep for a long time are best stored in an ASCII format.
How can one store complex documents for a long time without worrying that the company will go out of business or make the document obsolete? There are two ASCII based formats that are particularly good......................
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