According to the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which took effect on Dec.1, 2006, small business, including those run out of home offices, must now be prepared, at any time, to furnish "electronically stored information" that could pertain to civil litigations involving their companies.

We have found a product that resolves the search and physical media library issues with archiving to removable media. The main issue most users have is searching them later to retrieve the data and managing the physical media library. The same with flash cards, you never know what’s on them.

The product is called Datacatch Librarian, Datacatch provides media storage solutions for backups, archives or photos stored on CD, DVD, Flash memory and removable hard drives. It catalogs your removable media and extends the Windows file management system so that you are seamlessly searching for files stored on removable media within Windows.

So you search for online and offline content in the same standard Windows search; you even browse the thumbnails of photos stored on your DVD’s. You manage the physical media in exactly the same way your put a Word document in a newly created folder, you locate your discs in a storage container icon on your desktop AND it tells you what slot their in.

Because it looks and feels like Windows there’s nothing new to learn, it just the same as searching and organizing folders in Windows, very cool and worth a look.

It’s also worth noting that it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to archive to gold quality DVD or Blu-ray than paying 9.99$ per month to store one DVD of data online!

How long do you have to keep the data for?

Actaully I'm not a 100% sure. I know that the IRS govern general account data retention so it can't be any longer than 7 years.

In places like health care they have to keep the records for the life of the patient so I suppose that could be 100 years

I'm interested to know what anyone else is doing to archive data, as opposed to just backing up?

We are just backing up our data at my prior firm we did do archiving but I dont see a lot of small businesses doing it.

We do the same

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www.capitaldomainmanager.com

We put photos, email, historical documents, video files, and other important resources into digital format, then organizing them effectively; you can make these items available to anyone with a Web browser. At any time, from anywhere – with no fear of damage.

With the technologies available to scan, organize, and manage digital media archives, your institution can make valuable items, now available in digital form, available to library users, researchers, or anyone.