Have you ever considered the number of emails and other electronic documents generated each day by each employee in your organisation? Today, the relatively low cost of storing documents in electronic form compared to the cost of storing paper copies has resulted in a tendency for companies to store more documents and for longer. Many organisations now measure the quantity of electronic data stored in terabytes – a terabyte being the terrifyingly large 1 million megabytes.
Consider also that documents might be stored in various locations, for example on the hard drive of an employee’s computer, the company's central file server, back-up discs, PDAs, USB keys, an employee’s home computer, or other locations. A document may have been deleted from the central file server but a copy retained in another location such as the hard drive of an employee’s computer.
