How to digitally archive your records and papers

While we live in an increasingly digitally driven world, we still get a lot of physical items that we have to hold on to for various practical, legal, and tax requirements. Unfortunately this can quickly take up too much space for material that you might only use once every few years at best. There’s also the risk that should some disaster happen, like a fire, all your records go up in smoke and suddenly you are in real trouble when you do need to call it on again. What about the issue of finding one record in hundreds when might only have part information on how to find it. The solutions to these issues is digital archiving
In a nutshell, digital archiving is the conversion of paper documents into their electronic equivalent while retaining as accurate copy of the information as can be made. So why do it

• Minimises space – A modern portable hard drive the size of a pack of playing cards can store a terabyte or more of information, or 10s of thousands of scanned pages of documents. You can store hundreds of books worth in a cheap flash drive or memory card. 
• Easy to copy – Because everything is just data, copying is just a couple of button clicks on the computer screen and is a 100 percent accurate copy of the master. A lot better these photocopies of photocopies we use to have to deal with.
• Easy to backup offsite – thanks to modern internet connections, you can have a computer automatically copy all your records to another one in a different building, city, country, or somewhere in the ‘cloud’. This means if you lose your records at your place of work, there’s a backup that can restore everything in just a few hours at worse. If you don’t want to use the internet, you can just have a few portable hard drives and take copies off site manually
• Available to everyone instantly – Once on a computer drive, if you have your system set up right then every computer on your business network would be able to access with a few button clicks.
• Searchable – One of parts of digital archiving is Optical Character Recognition processing. With the right software the documents can be turned into text like a wordpressor or spreadsheet  document, allowing you to easily search and copy information. That same copied information then can be edited like any other document.
  

So how do you get your documents digitally archived? Simple, come to us at Copy Express. We handle everything from books, stacks of paper records, to old engineering and architectural plans. What can we offer for you archiving needs.

• Books and Papers – can be scanned page by page by hand and then compiled into a pdf, with the option of being set up for searchable text or even converted into a word document.  If we can, we will load it into automatic document scanner as this speeds up the process and cut the costs to you.
• Posters and Art – Now depending on the size and the nature of what it is we can either do on our A3 flatbed scanner or feed it through our wide format scanner. Wide format scanner can scan items up to 1.2m wide and any length but as it is a roll fed system (think of those old washing machine mangles) any item put through is at the owner’s risk. The output is a your choice of pdf, tiff, or jpeg up to 600dpi in resolution.
• Plans – our wide format scanner is designed with plans in mind so can handle all types of plans, including blueprints and tracing paper ones. Once scan you can have it in a variety of formats, and we can even run special software processing that will correct damage and try to make everything is square and consistent no matter the age of the plan.
  

From there we can burn everything on a disc, copy it on to a flash drive/memory card/hard drive you bring in, or send it to you by email or via online storage site.
Now there are some limitations for what we can do, copyright is an obvious one, we will do our very best to give you a solution that will fit your needs and help declutter your office. Call us today and let us help you get digital today.