As cheap as hardware (hard drives) is and given the risk that you could
damage the drive during transfer or have data loss (the human factor) it
would seem to me that it would be a better practice to just keep the drive
and replace it with a new one. In three years you will be replacing the PC
with a new one anyway - there would be no thought of reusing the drive.



Regards,

Michael

Michael Marchand
VeriTrust - VP Operations
www.veritrust.net



On 11/17/05, Margaret Duncan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone:
>
> A question has come up in discussion that I thought my esteemed colleagues
> would be able to help with.  When an employee leaves the company (in this
> case a financial institution) what do you do with their hard drives?
>
> Recently it was decided to keep the hard drives for three years and then
> wipe them clean and reuse them.  I had suggested that they make a copy of
> the hard drive and store on an isolated server for the retention period, but
> in order to do this there would be compression of the information.  Someone
> felt that this altered the record and said we couldn't do it.  So we
> physically store the hard drives for three years in the records center.  The
> reason for keeping the hard drives are two fold -- regulatory and
> administrative
>
> My questions is this:
>
> Does compressing data alter the record?  If so wouldn't this mean that
> other compression methods are altering data?  Even if it does alter the data
> can it be reversed?  I know compression changes the size, but not the
> information as far as I know.
>
> Thanks in advance for all your ideas.
>
>
> Meg Duncan, CRM
> Boston, MA
>
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