Locked In

The greatest capital costs to stave off these enemies will be placed into the storage facility itself, often configured as a vault that is sealed off against these elements and enemies.

But even before the discs and tapes to be stored reach the vault, a records management firm needs to consider the route between the customer’s location and the records facility, which can include the same perils even in this brief timeframe.

CUTTING RISK

As the electronic information storage industry has evolved, so has the attitude of how to properly handle back-up tapes.

Just as car seats were created and modified to keep young passengers safer, specialized containers have been designed and updated to offer safe passage to electronic information cargo.

While grocery shoppers are confronted with the choice of paper or plastic for their containers, records storage firms and their customers can choose between plastic and metal.

Among the metal container makers is Douglas Manufacturing Corp. of Crete, Neb. The company, which was founded in 1883, had long been a leader in the construction of metal voting booths when it expanded into electronic media storage boxes in the 1970s.

That market has proven to be a growing one for Douglas, which now offers cushioned steel boxes in a variety of sizes and colors.

On its Web site, the company touts the following among the advantages of its metal storage boxes:

• Steel construction, which it says
guards against fire damage;

Some records management firms may choose to stack the Douglas boxes in their facilities while others deploy the containers simply on the ride to and from the storage vault.

The same applications hold for plastic containers that carry the Turtle brand name made by Perma-A-Store, Golden Valley, Minn.

Turtle cases may serve as part of a storage system or strictly as couriers delivering media to highly-compact racking and shelving systems where the bulk of the boxes are unwelcome.

Perm-A-Store’s Turtles are touted by the company as offering similar advantages as metal boxes, including cushion liners that offer impact resistance and overall resistance to temperature changes, humidity and other enemies of magnetic media.

"Data’s enemies haven’t changed," the company’s Web site states. It lists those enemies as:

DISC DRIVE

Early this year, Perm-A-Store introduced Turtle cases designed specifically for CD and DVD storage, recognizing the popularity of this format, especially among young people running emerging businesses who are familiar and comfortable with this format.

Recent college graduates who have been burning discs since their middle school years are entering the workforce and bringing the love of the format with them. Images, scanned documents and other graphic arts files in particular are migrating to the format.

"The utilization of CDs and DVDs in the business environment is exploding," remarks Alan O’Regan, Perm-A-Store’s vice president of sales and marketing. "Archiving and backing up images is a requirement in today’s world," he continues. "Significant efforts are underway to migrate images from paper/film to digital data on CDs/DVDs or hard disks. This new case answers the challenge of safely transporting larger quantities of CDs or DVDs in a container that protects the customers’ valuable data," he notes.

One challenge for records center managers is making sure their customers understand the importance of using such containers so that the security process starts immediately.

John Bauknight IV, a co-founder of Shred First LLC and Total Records and Information Management (TRIM), Spartanburg, S.C., notes that TRIM drivers pick up electronic media from customers stored in a variety of ways. Some customers have used what TRIM considers "non-proper methods," including cardboard boxes, in residential-style "under the bed" plastic storage cases or even a few cartridges held together with a rubber band.

TRIM encourages its customers to use metal storage containers and offers the steel boxes as rental units to its customers for just a few dollars per month. This storage method not only helps keep electronic files safe on their way to the TRIM vault, but can encourage customers to keep such files safe if they are transporting them from one of their offices to another.

This can be critical, Bauknight says, in cases where a customer’s employee not familiar with electronic information safekeeping may stop for lunch and leave magnetic tapes in a car that reaches a scorching summertime temperature. A well-designed container can alleviate disaster in such cases.

The habits and knowledge of customers can vary greatly, which is why a records center manager in the Gulf Coast region strongly suggests that storage companies insist on handling all aspects of pickup and delivery of records and files.

In the case of his company, the worst case scenario occurred not with electronic media but on the paper documents side. A client company insisted it would handle delivery of records to the storage center, but an employee simply placed covered cardboard boxes in the back of a pickup truck. "Those lids blew off once that driver was on the highway, and paper came flying out," recalls the records storage manager, who then had to help the driver re-trace his steps and collect paper as well as inform the customer of what had happened.

The incident shows why with sensitive or important information, whether on paper or stored on electronic media, careful consideration toward best practices has to be shown from the very start of the process.