May 2010

Best practices for archiving documents or
“What happened to my e-fax?”

Question of the day:  I’m looking to save documents in a format that will be viewable in 10 years or so. How do I do that without worrying about if the software or format will still be available or usable?

Changing File Formats

Were you an early adopter of electronic faxing services? We were. Back then the fax came into your email inbox in a proprietary format. You could open the electronic fax with the software from the company that you had the e-fax service with. Like most people, we saved off these files (contracts, etc.) believing we could retrieve them in the future.

Wrong! Our e-fax service changed their software and we lost every e-fax document that we had archived and saved. The company did not provide backward compatibility and there was nothing we could do.

PDF/A as an Archiving Standard

PDF is the electronic standard for exchanging information. To avoid a situation like with e-fax, PDF/A standard adoption guarantees that everyone will be able to access their archived documents years into the future.

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