6 Things to Take Care of While Archiving your Website

With passing days, the amount of data you possess also increases and so it becomes difficult to preserve it. Even though we don’t need all this data every day, we still need to store it for our future references.

Therefore, there’s a need to archive the data so that it is easily accessible and doesn’t occupy the needed space. When you archive the data, it speeds up the workflow process, cleans the repositories, and archives the old information.

To do this, there are a few things that you need to keep in your mind.

1. When to archive data?

In 2011, the healthcare industry generated 150 exabytes of data. Storing this huge amount of data in your primary storage is not feasible for anybody. No matter how much you try, approximately 7.5% of data is always lost.

Every company reaches a certain point where they cannot store the data. If you are at such a stage, it’s time to archive your data before it becomes a burden for you.

When you have employees archiving the data instead of softwares, there’s always a risk of losing data. So, you can use automated software tools that work best for your data retention. This tells the software automatically which data is useful and which has to be deleted.

1. What content must be archived?

You can decide your own parameters in these automated tools for screenshots archive or information archive. Once you do this, these softwares automatically identifies the content based on the selected parameters and archives the content.

You can choose to archive content older than 4 months or documents that are older than a specified number of generations. It is you who decide what to archive and the software does it for you.

Before selecting the parameters, check how often you need that data, review the information, check if you need to submit it to the government, and then move it into the archives.

1. How can you define the limit of access to these archives?

To know this, decide who can access the archived documents and how that can be done. This limitation is important because, in the end, your employees are all humans.

So, let’s understand it this way, the number of files the CEO needs to see is useless to the receptionist. So, you can limit the access to certain important files. The automated software tools also provide different types of access like read, write, edit and delete.

So, an administrator can be the one who can write or archive the data but the document authors can only delete the original content. Similarly, managers can edit the archived documents whereas clients can only read them.

1. Where to store archives?

You can either store these archives in a physical center or digitally in the cloud. In 2015, 93% of businesses were using cloud storage that has only kept increasing with time.

If you’re confused about the correct alternative for you, estimate the cost of a physical center required to store these things and then compare it with the cost of the cloud. You’ll find out that cloud storage saves you time, energy, and cost.

You can also retrieve the data easily from the cloud without any hassle. Additionally, it offers more security through VPN, access controls, and homomorphic encryption.

1. Why should you archive data?

The automated softwares organizes the archived data with the help of metadata and tags. This makes it easier to fetch the content.

Another benefit is that even if there’s any natural calamity, your data won’t be suffering. You might be able to produce backups or retrieve original files because you have already archived your data.

1. What are the additional benefits?

It is also easy and cheap to archive data. Whatever you think can be useful to you in the future, you can simply archive it and limit access to it for better security.

Over to you…

These are a few benefits and factors to consider while archiving your content. This is extremely important if you’re planning to expand your business in the future. Archiving will make it easy for you to store the data in a manner that it doesn’t occupy the required space but also can be retrieved any time you want.