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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