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Posted By John Thompson
How long is 'reasonable' to keep general records on cleaning, maintence, on the job training etc?
I know you should keep EL Certs for 40 years, but what about ordinary records. Records are obviuosly imporant, (if not vital) in an effort to prove due deligence but how long back should we keep them?
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Posted By CFT
John
If it is non incident related I tend to keep for 3 years; if the documentation has potential links to anything to do with EL insurance then it gets archived for the same period.
That is what I do anyway.
CFT
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Posted By Ron Hunter
Horses for courses John? e.g.
Maintenance/service log for a machine should ideally be kept (up-to-date) for the lifetime of the machine (more to help those who service and maintain.
Training records only need to demonstrate that training is current, (e.g.) not more than 3 years old - no need to keep old certificates?
Occ Health records are effectively "forever"!
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Posted By Son of SkyWalker
If you want to keep them why not scan them and save to disk and place in a fire resistant container in addition to keeping them in a file on the computer. Who says you need the paper copy?
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Posted By Gary Clarkson
If you do decide to burn to disc, be aware that cd's,dvd's, etc do not last forever. if you need the data for more than 2 or 3 years you would be wise to consider archiving to a solid state media ( memory stick or a traditional hard disk).
unfortunatly I know this from experience.
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Posted By Colin Reeves
The "Paperless Office" - do any you recall that name from years ago?
Kept a lot of records on 5.25 discs, then 3.5 discs, all obsolete. CDs and DVDs will shortly become obsolete.
On the other hand, paper and Mark 1 eyeballs do not become obsolete.
As for digital photography, don't let me start .....
Luddite
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Posted By Son of SkyWalker
All that paperwork surely cannot be stored easily over a number of years. It can become not only a financial burden but a fire load burden.
Many companies may not have the money to store properly. If you believe that the disc may become obsolete that is overcome by keeping a copy on the computer.
You may also want to perform an assessment to identify the best digital storage format.
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Posted By Dave Merchant The press reports of CD and DVD data not lasting for more than a few years are simply not true interpretations of the original research by NML [now archived at www.imation.com] and COSA - while it is true that in the early years of REWRITABLE CD-RW / DVD-RW there was the potential for optical reversion (since the data was encoded in quite a subtle way), modern write-once discs are normally considered to have a retention lifetime of at least 30 years if stored correctly. It's also perfectly possible for end-users to recopy media periodically, should better hardware or software become available, and to make duplicates (since any errors would not occur identically across copies all the original data can be retrieved) To quote from the NML report:- "In a normal, air-conditioned, office environment, with the temperature between 18 and 23 C and relative humidity between 30 and 55%, ... recordable optical disc may register an output signal loss of 2 dB over a storage time span of 50 years. A 2 dB data output loss is ... well within the capability of the error correction system built into all data storage devices." Solid-state drives may be physically more robust in terms of impact and storage temperature, but there is no evidence their data is any more stable over archival timescales and they remain sensitive to accidental rewriting during a read operation, unlike with optical discs. Since they require firmware to link them to a computer they are far more likely to become "obsolete" than optical discs are.
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Posted By Colin Reeves
Dave
Interesting research document. It is strange that "professional" PC magazines are still clear that optical data is not reliable enough for archive work (PC Pro is the one I read).
Anyway, does not alter my original contention that data formats change over time (and fairly rapidly). Try opening an old WordPerfect / Locoscript etc document or even an old version of Word these days with Office 2007 (or whatever it is called). And I recall that 3.5 floppies were sold as "the medium of the future", where are they now less than 20 years later!!
CDs etc will become redundant soon, paper does not, although I agree that safe storage is a different concern.
Luddite
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Posted By Dave Merchant I think the magazines are covering collective backsides - if they say a disc will last 20 years and it doesn't someone will be peeved! Document format is probably far more of a problem than storage media - for example saving as plain text or CSV is far better than using Excel or Word, since anything in the future will be able to re-import the data even if you can't read the proprietary files. Most of the archive projects I work with are using PDF/A as it's designed to be readable by any possible future version of a PDF reader program. As the file format is open-source even if Adobe goes bust you'll still be able to work with the files, and of course you can print anything to a PDF (text, data, pictures, even 3D models) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
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