I would certainly echo Peter's comment about doing a backfile conversion. If the documents are relatively inactive, your cost of offsite storage is perhaps $30,000 a year. Imaging those is a lot more than doing the storage calculation. Frankly, with Terrabyte hard drives running under $100 these days, the cost of base electronic storage is like the cost of dirt. Certainly, an enterprise storage system with proper backups and so forth gets pricey, but those numbers are effectively rounding errors to capture of the documents. Since the type of record being scanned was not mentioned, it is hard to determine what sorts of costs could be involved, but capture costs for a box of records can easily exceed $100 per standard box, particularly if you can't automate the indexing. So let's consider a best case situation... assume that capture costs $.01 per page and you have 1000 pages per box. That's $10 per box right there. That means the records would need
 to be maintained for more that five years to break even with the capture cost against offsite storage of the paper. (Assuming no real retrieval requirement.) But prepping the documents generally requires a labor expense, as does indexing and then there's the whole infrastructure thing...

Clearly, if there are other business factors (vital records status, high retrieval rates, need for high availability, etc.), the business case shifts very quickly.
 
 Patrick Cunningham, CRM
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