If you are a student at a computer institute, or an office executive using computers, chances are high that you are unable to find the right file at the right time. Proper preservation of your computer files is highly important. This will not only save your time and valuable data, but also ensure record-keeping compliance as mandated by companies and government bodies. Here are some file management and archiving practices, which you can practice to get a fair idea about the process.
Here are a few beginners’ tips for file preservation:
• Create a new folder for each project you work on. Create subfolders (thereby creating a folder hierarchy) for each of the various items necessary for that project. For instance, if you are doing a web development project, you might have an ‘images’ folder to store the graphics files and a separate ‘webpages’ folder to store the HTML files.
• Always try to name your files in lower case. File extensions in particular are
case-sensitive.
• Never use spaces in file names. Sometimes computers interpret spaces as ‘%20’. Therefore, a file named ‘New York’ may take the form ‘New%20York’.
Document Preserving and Archiving
Let us now turn our attention to document preservation and Document Management Systems (DMS). A DMS is a special-purpose software that preserves your electronic documents and facilitates their easy retrieval. A DMS is a great empowerment tool for the employees in an organization. It frees up employees’ time towards more productive work for the organization. Not a single minute is wasted in retrieving the required file when required. A DMS works by a background process called document indexing. The indexing process is really mind-boggling as it can keep track of hundreds and thousands of files.
Companies across the world have enough reasons to justify their investment towards a high-class DMS. Today, audit and legal stipulations dictate companies to preserve files and records for a certain period of time (some even forever). Older paper documents are scanned and archived so that they occupy a much lesser space.