Records Retention - Where More Is Not Better

What to keep?  What not to keep? What to keep and for how long?  These were once loose rules that we each made up for ourselves, but today, we can get in trouble for not keeping something long enough, or worse yet, for keeping something too long. 

There are people who now make their living advising others on their records retention policies.  I grew up business-wise in the age of retaining. With the advent of the digital age we have gained with each year a greater and greater amount of available storage. The cloud and services like dropbox and box give even the smallest of businesses the chance to store and retain what never could have been kept before.

There aren't enough steel storage case cabinets available to handle what even one of us stores today digitally.

But, is this a good thing?  Ask a lawyer and the answer will be no.  Whatever is available is discoverable.  Whatever is randomly stored or randomly deleted is suspect. Knowing the different is the key.  It behooves us to have a policy of record retention, follow and embrace it. 

Ironic, but in this age of more availability, that less is still better.

(For a further faith-based application of this post you can visit here)