Old Tax Returns

[JON]

Old Jon

We went paperless 3 years ago for 1040s only. I have forced myself to clear out offsite storage about every 3 years. To get a discount on liability insurance I attend one of their seminars every other year. The attorney presenting said establish your policy of retention, the more the worse, make sure this is communicated in writing to your clients and do not keep anything longer than that. Information should always be returned to the client and they should always be the first source for the information no matter how bad at it they are. It is nice to have clients that are friends, but their business needs to be run well.

I am still working on training in my clients or are they training me in?????

[Unregistered]

When 5.25 were going out they had the 3.5's and we all moved toward that. Then to CD/DVD format. In fact, now, I have nothing stored on removable media. Everything is server based (hard drive space is cheap). The server has mirrored hard drives as well as tape backup using top of the line backup software. The tapes are removed and taken offsite with daily, weekend and month end tapes I have plenty of redundancies in place. So the question I have for you is, if you have a fire or flood, how do you restore your data?

Matt

Have you ever restored data?! Most people back up but restore does not work as expected!

[Matt Sova]

IT guy

My IT guy is phenonmenal. He has run a restore for me at the end of 2005 just to make sure everything is working properly.

[Bees Knees]

So the question I have for you is, if you have a fire or flood, how do you restore your data?

With HD space cheap and high speed internet getting cheaper, the next step is to have automatic off site downloads going on every night. Now you have a mirror HD off site if the building blows up.

That's what saved all of the businesses in the World Trade Center after 9/11. They all had their data stored off site.

[Matt Sova]

Funny you should mention that

I am looking at getting a gigantasaurus sized hard drive at the house. I use gotomypc to do work from home as it is and I can also use to to automatically backup in the middle of the night.

I have the tape backups off site, but this is kind of like wearing a belt with suspenders.