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Document Retention - How Long is Too Long?
darthtuttle asks: "With
the recent news of document destruction at Enron and the emails that have
been discovered in high profile cases such as MS -vs- DOJ document
retention seems to be a hot item right now. What document retention policies
do people have at their companies, and what steps do companies take to
make sure that documents are destroyed according to the policy when their
time is up so they don't come back to haunt the company later? Note: the
purpose of a document retention policy is not to keep documents, but to
make sure they get destroyed according to policy before someone outside
the company decides to use it against you. The big issues seems to be
backups and documents stored on peoples desktop/laptops. You don't
want those email server backup tapes from 2 years ago to be found, and
you don't want to find out that the CFO was saving -every- email they
ever got on their laptop."
Documents should be retained for the amount of time it takes to walk from your desk to the paper shredder.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
When asked by a secretary if she could destroy old documents that were just taking up space, Samuel Goldwyn, the movie mogul replied:
Go ahead but just make sure you make copies of everything first
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
There is no one size fits all answer to this one.
I'm having a hard time deciding if you're referring back to your subject line with that one...
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Retain nothing, and enact all corporate strategy completely at random, in total ignorance of past history.
It's what you're doing anyway, right?
Hrm...
It's probably better than tech support...
You can just save all of your documents as Micr@soft Word. The files will become unreadable after a few years anyway. Hmmmm, I wonder if that was designed as a feature?
This is too long.
Just^W use^W some common sense^U
^C
^D
EOF
-- no carrier --
It finally came down to this. After years of hounding users to make backups now we'll have to hound users to stop backing up their systems!
;)
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning