The Dutch Tax department requires to keep records of your email, correspondence, faxes etc. for at least 7 years, my accountant suggested even 10 years.

 

Many small companies have never given this a thought and I now want to provide some advise on how to do this. As we know hardware and software in 7 years will not be the same and DVDs and hard disks can not work being in a safe place for such a long time.

 

Has anybody some advise on how to do this for companies less than 25 employees.

 

I was just thinking of copying the faxes and exchange store to an harddrive which we just check every half year if the disk is readable? But what about the software to read it, or recover it, what about the Sharepoint information etc.

 

Just a backup of SBS2003 is an idea, but by that time we might have the successor of Cougar already running. Do we need to keep the original software at hand as well?

 

Your thoughts please?

As we all know data in a backup needs to be checked and we are talking here about 7-10 years storage. Do you once a year check your backup to see if you can get it working, do you test the external drive/tape?

 

Bart