Best Practices for Scanning then Shredding Paper Documents

Some 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. If you’re using QuikFile to process incoming scans, make sure that you keep the backup copies of the originals. By default, these go to the "c:QuikFile backups" folder. Having a backup copy can be invaluable if anything later happens to the PDF version.

2. 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.

3. Always keep multiple backups of your scanned archives! You should keep a local backup for redundancy as well as a remote backup. 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. Automated services use your Internet connection to back up files to enterprise-class data centers.