Businesses and individuals today are emphasizing simplification and sustainability. This means reducing our carbon footprint by purchasing less, keeping offices streamlined, reducing, re-using, recycling … and, often, creating a paperless office. 

Going paperless has a number of advantages, including:

– Less storage space required for important documents, which may reduce overhead costs

– Reduced budgets for paper, printing and photocopying

– Less waste, which can reduce a business’s costs as well as its carbon footprint

– Easier organization for a more streamlined, comfortable, modern office 

– 24/7 availability of documents and files if they are hosted in the cloud, giving employees more flexibility to work any time, anywhere

But there are also a few drawbacks. Let’s not forget that some people just like the feeling of tangible paper between their fingers. But, most importantly, if you transfer all your documents to a virtual environment, you want to make sure you don’t lose them. 

If you’ve been storing mission critical company files in fireproof safes, you want a virtual storage solution that is going to be equally safe, even in the event of a disaster like a fire or flood.

That’s why cloud storage is becoming a preferred method to store and back up files. But, as we’ve seen over the past few years with the crashes of several major servers, no form of file storage is 100 percent safe. 

Our free advice? Find a data recovery service you can trust before moving your documents to a hard drive, server, or the cloud, keep their number handy in the event of a data recovery emergency, and always maintain back-ups.