Going Paperless: Best Practices for Scanning then Shredding Paper Documents

Part of the Going Paperless Series

Companies that are making the change to a paperless office want to shred the originals and only keep a digital copy. This is an excellent way to archive documents, but you should follow these recommendations to avoid the loss of a document:

1. Before shredding the original paper copy of the document, find the PDF on the computer and make sure that it was scanned correctly. Never shred the original until you are certain that all pages have been scanned and stored properly.
2. Always keep multiple backups of your scanned archives!  A few options here:

• Today you can use cloud storage to keep backup with enterprise-grade security and redundancy.
• The local backup can be a mirrored or RAID drive, an external drive, a tape backup, DVD, etc.
• The remote backup should be kept geographically distant from the original – preferably at least one state away.

Photo Credit: By Jonathan Joseph Bondhus (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

---