Archiving plates, films and files

[tamale]

We are having discussions on how long to keep a client's digital file, film and plates.

Is there an industry standard or best practice for archiving? Your thoughts are most welcome as we cant seem to come to an agreement!

Tamale

 

[wonderings]

We have been cutting down on the plates we keep. Before I started they kept everything, even dated flyers that could never be reused as they had a date on them.

As for files, I like to keep everything. Hard drive space is not a big deal and they are cheap. My files go back years and years. Every so often we get someone who printed something 10 years ago and wants to do it again or use something from that file, nice to be able to pull it up and be able to do something with it.

 

[maac]

We also archive our files for Nexus for years with stuffit. We have at least 13 years of them and yes a lot of them we can trash. We keep the links active and compress the pages. The imposition layouts from DynaStrip are the same.

 

[dabob]

We archive plates for repeat items . . .files we have forever, I have CD backups going back to January 1998 but haven't used CDs for archiving since about 2010 . . just redundant hard drives and backups to raids . . .