The Risks
Fire, flood and water damage, pests, theft or vandalism, the risks are myriad. Have you considered the potential following scenarios and how these might affect your irreplaceable historic documentation and other important information stored away in unsecure archives?
- Partial or complete destruction from fire or smoke damage and the inevitable ruinous effect that putting out a fire can cause to paper-based documentation
- Flood and more general water damage, such as storing documentation in damp or humid conditions
- Insect and/or rodent attack. Invertebrates and small mammals don't regard your data or documentation as important, other than a source of bedding!
- Theft
- Deliberate or unintentional vandalism, including defacing documentation with markers or highlighter pens, rendering parts of the document unreadable). Or matters far less prosaic, such as terrorist or other unrelated activity that has the same effect as a targeted attack, or more deliberately contrived electronic attacks (hacking, hacktivists, denial of service attacks, disgruntled ex-employees, etc.) on your organisation
- Random electronic attacks such as computer viruses like worms or Trojans which can infect systems and corrupt data, or catastrophic hard-drive failure which can have even more of a disastrous effect on your data
- Human error – probably the most likely, and the least prevented. Whether it’s a simple mistake of returning items to the wrong place, to less easily fixable accidental loss or damage, to err is human.To create a back-up or recovery plan, is divine...
