Your Documents
We scan the vast majority of documents into the Portable Document Format (PDF), once the documents have passed quality check and been OCR’d and compressed they are converted to the PDF/A format.
PDF/A is an ISO-standardised version of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specialised for the digital preservation of electronic documents. PDF/A differs from PDF by omitting features ill-suited to long-term archiving, such as font linking (as opposed to font embedding). Therefore the PDF/A format is the obvious format choice for archiving information.
Invented by Adobe Systems and perfected over 17 years, Portable Document Format (PDF) is the global standard for capturing and reviewing rich information from almost any application on any computer system and sharing it with virtually anyone, anywhere.
Some of the key reasons why we have chosen Portable Document Format:
- An open standard — PDF is a formal open standard known as ISO 32000. Maintained by the International Organization for Standardization, ISO 32000 will continue to be developed with the objective of protecting the integrity and longevity of PDF, providing an open standard for the more than one billion PDF files in existence today.
- Multiplatform — PDF files are viewable and printable on virtually any platform, including Windows®, Mac OS, and mobile platforms such as Android™.
- Extensible — More than 2,000 vendors worldwide offer PDF-based solutions including creation, plug-in, consulting, training, and support tools.
- Trusted and reliable — More than 150 million PDF documents publicly available on the web today, along with countless PDF files in government agencies and businesses around the world, serve as evidence of the number of organizations that rely on PDF to capture information.
- Rich in file integrity — PDF files look like original documents and preserve source file information — text, drawings, multimedia, video, 3D, maps, full-colour graphics, photos, and even business logic — regardless of the application used to create them and even when compiled from multiple formats into a single PDF Portfolio.
- Searchable — Text-search features in documents and metadata make PDF documents easily searchable.
- Accessible — PDF documents work with assistive technology to help make information accessible to people with disabilities.
Data Storage
We offer a number of different data storage solutions to store the electronic versions of your documents. These solutions vary however depending on the volume of documents and the level of security that is required.
Our standard data storage solution is to store your documents on a fully encrypted flash drive. We will then deliver this encrypted flash drive to you personally where we will decrypt the files on your premises and copy them to your desired location such as server or backup drive. We can also provide training on how to decrypt these files so you can perform this function yourself if you prefer.
The following is some of our popular storage solutions with a rough estimate of the total number of documents that can be stored on each medium. This however depends solely on the average file size and this figure will depend on the type of document it is. For example: Invoices that are typically only 1-3 pages long will be around 40KB in size. Client files for example however which typically contain 200 to 300 pages will be around 4MB in size.
The following examples are based on an average file size of 4MB.
CD-ROM
A single CD-ROM will store approximately 175 documents which is approximately 15 large archive boxes of paperwork.
DVD
A single DVD will store approximately 1200 documents which is approximately 100 large archive boxes of paperwork.
Flash Drive
With flash drives typically ranging in capacity of 2GB to 64 GB they will store approximately 510 to 16400 documents which is approximately 45 to 1400 large archive boxes of paperwork.
External Hard Drive
With external hard drives ranging in capacity of 120GB to 4TB they will store approximately 30720 to 1 million documents which is approximately 2635 to 85765 large archive boxes of paperwork.