Archiving your data can feel like a daunting task, especially the more data you have to manage. If you have been paying an ever-increasing amount of money to store and manage your data or suffering from long and cumbersome data backups, you should consider archiving your data. A quick audit of your data will show you how much of it you actually use, and how much is not even touched. Typically, this is anywhere from 60-80% of our data.
Here are 5 file archiving tips you can use to save time and money as you move through the process.
Do Your Research
The best way to maximize ROI on your file archiving project is to research the best strategies and solutions available to you. Take a free trial from a few vendors and compare features and pricing to make the right decision based on your needs and budget.
Ask questions that impact how you will engage with the archiving software. Then determine if it truly solves your problems and whether it can help you become more productive and profitable.
Does it offer seamless access to your data, are you restricted to a certain number of users, do you have the ability to search files on and off the central repository? These are all great questions to ask either before or during a demo or trial.
Create Scalable Data Archiving Policies
As your company grows, so will your data volumes. Defining policies that scale with your business is a great way to maximize your time and minimize the resources required to scale up. The best file archiving software allows you to create and manage your data-driven policies from a central location in just a few clicks.
The file archiving process should be simple and straightforward. The more granular your policies are the better. Do you only want to archive data older than a year, or do you want to archive all PDF files older than 6 months on a weekly basis? Once you decide on a data retention plan that works for you, simply model your data archiving policies after it.
Make Archived Data Seamlessly Accessible
Archiving your data can save a lot of time and money long-term. It is also a great way to secure you files and compress them for streamlined data storage and management. If your data is not easily accessed by end users, however, it can lead to severe productivity delays which negate its effectiveness.
Your goal should be seamless data access. That is, end users access their data as if it had never been archived. This means no client is deployed, no training is required, and users can access their files never knowing anything but their existing environment.
Create a Disaster Recovery Plan
Knowing your data is secure and accessible in the event of a system failure, natural disaster, or data breach not only provides peace of mind but also allows you to keep operations running. This is critical to your company’s success and its bottom line.
By creating a disaster recovery plan, you’re ensuring business continuity and enable faster data restoration in the event of an emergency. Archiving your data is great, but if all of that data is lost once disaster strikes, it means nothing (and neither do these file archiving tips).
Make Sure Archived Data is Secure
You should know that your files are being stored in a highly-secure data repository, especially if you are archiving private or sensitive data. While some may consider this a nice feature or file server archiving tip, many consider this to be a requirement.
Growing regulatory compliance requires organizations to retain sensitive data and make it available when required, which is the reason many of these unused files are archived in the first place. Storing them in a secure repository not only ensures easy access but also data compliance that guarantees data is as was stored originally.
