Making sure your documents are safe and easily accessible is a top priority for everyone but this cannot be assured when you are still using the traditional ways of safeguarding documents.
These traditional ways include laminating our documents and keeping them inside a box or somewhere out of the reach of people in our houses or offices. These ways as well all know are not effective because anything can happen at any time.
Documents, in this case, include land documents, partnership deeds, car papers, school certificates, church documents, ID cards, CVs, resumes, etc.
Reasons why the traditional ways of safeguarding documents are not ideal
We all know that if you keep your documents at home or in your office and some hazards like fire outbreak, flood or the likes occurs, they will get spoilt and this means that we have lost them. Imagine your certificate of occupancy gets burnt by fire, and someone who knows that decides to lay claim to your land, your car documents get burnt, etc. this automatically means that you are in for a big thing.
Also, assume you as a businessman or an entrepreneur run into a business deal that needs you to submit a very important document and you are far away from where the needed documents are and also, you are expected to submit these documents within a short interval of time. This might make you lose the contract simply because you are making use of the traditional way of keeping documents.
Also, your documents are prone to theft by people and illegal access by people. If someone lays his hand on your trade secret, for instance, it means your chances of being on top of your game will be reduced greatly. Also, rodents like rat have evolved so much that they have special skills in destroying documents. You wouldn’t want them to do so to your very important documents.
How then can we find solutions to the aforementioned disadvantages of the traditional ways of safeguarding our documents? You may be asking this question but be rest assured that we would tell you in a bit.
Best ways of safeguarding documents
The advent of technology and the internet as a whole has made life easy. They have affected the way we do business, eat, communicate, etc. We can also take advantage of the internet for the safe and efficient keeping of our documents.
The best way of safeguarding documents in this 21st century is to upload all of them to the cloud. The cloud we mean here is the internet i.e. to online storage spaces that all run on secured servers.
Don’t worry; we would take you through the best ways of doing so.
Ways of safeguarding documents on the internet
There are basically two ways of getting these documents as soft copies because they can only be stored as soft copies. They include;
Scanning: this is a very good way of getting documents as soft copies. This involves your scanning the documents with a scanner and then saving them online. This method is very expensive and not many have access to a scanner and cannot afford to pay for them.
Snapping: Yes! This is probably the easiest and cheapest way of getting the documents as soft copies. With the advent of highly sophisticated smartphones, this option has been made easier. You can take pictures of all your documents from the comfort of your room or office without spending a dime.
This is ideal for large documents and the higher the megapixel rating of your phone, the brighter the pictures and vice versa. If you can lay your hands on a camera, you can make use of it as well.
Where can I upload these documents to make them safe?
We assume that you have snapped or scanned the pictures at this point. Some people might be tempted to just leave these copies on their phones, systems or camera memory. While this is somewhat good to leave them on these devices, they might crash at any time and also, people have access to them as well and so, they are not that safe there.
There are so many online storage sites where you can upload them to. When uploaded, you can access them from anywhere in the world, just with your login details. Some of these platforms provide free spaces of up to 15 GB and you also have the option of buying extra space if you need to upload more.
Your email: Yes! We all have at least one personal email address with so many cooperate and business email addresses. You can take advantage of this. Just try sending an email to the same email address or to another email address, attach the snapped or scanned documents alongside the email and send.
It will get delivered to the email and then, anytime you wish to access them, just log in and locate them in your inbox folder.
There is also another option which is to just upload them and save as draft. When you save them as drafts, you can access them anytime, anywhere by opening your draft folder.
Google Drive: Google as a very powerful company has a cloud storage service called Google Drive where you can upload your documents to and keep them safe there. This service is very nice and we make use of it often. You are given 15 GB free storage space which you can increase at will. The security is assured because Google owns it.
To access this service, you need to have an email account with Google. Then, open the URL drive.google.com to access it. Also, you can share the document with others just by sharing the link with the person.
Dropbox: this is yet another service that you can make use of. We recommend this also and you can save large files to it. It ensures effective backup of files online and works on virtually all operating systems and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Although it cannot be compared with the other counterpart Google drive, it is a very good option.
Other options include
Microsoft OneDrive
Box, etc.
Conclusion:
Save your files online today and you won’t regret doing so. It is advised that you keep your usernames and passwords and other login details safe and never disclose them to anyone. Online storage is not only very secure but also accessible anytime, any day from anywhere.
