Speaking of archiving

[Kyung]

Does anyone actually go out and delete any of their old archived stuff?

I am so looking forward to when I no longer have to store some paper notes of stuff I took years ago. Why do I even keep the paper notes? I don't know. Paranoia, I guess.

So when push comes to shove, who know if I really will be able to dump any of my old files. But you've got to sooner or later, right? Right?

[Brenda Rogers]

I don't know what it is down there, but up here, we need to retain the notes in SOME form -- paper or electronic -- for 5 yrs for transcribed depositions, 10 yrs for holds (something you all dont know anything about). The 5 yrs retention applies to the finished transcript as well. Once 5 yrs are up, the electronic transcript can be trashed along with the notes.

Until very recently, the paper notes were the official notes in Oregon, so those were what needed to be retained; the electronic version wasn't enough. Thank goodness they changed that! I dumped paper notes by the carton loads.

[Jeannie Wright]

So, Brenda, what IS a hold? You're right, I don't know what one is, but I'm interested! TIA

[Brenda Rogers]

LOL Jeannie. I hope you don't learn firsthand!

A hold is when the transcript isn't ordered at the time of deposition. It's common in some places, unheard of in others. Some of them are ordered later, others not. Generally, the reason they're not ordered is because the case has settled before trial, or it's an independent witness who really had nothing to add. Or even a party who had nothing to add.

In Oregon, we don't have interrogatories before depos, which is why we get depos with no useful info sometimes, and we do have a healthy hourly fee.

[Stacy Tegner]

I believe in CA you need to save your notes in some fashion for 1 year transcribed and 8 years not transcribed. I don't have paper notes anymore ~ I'm on the LightSpeed ~ so I keep my note file along w/ my final transcript. I don't keep the audio file. I really have been wanting to look into an on-line backup system but haven't done that yet ~ do any of you use one??

[Brenda Rogers]

I use belt and suspenders -- Jungle Disk and Carbonite.

Jungle Disk backs up everything and keeps even things you've deleted from your computer.
Carbonite makes a mirror image of your hard drive, so anything you have deleted from your hard drive is retained for 30 days on Carbonite and then is discarded.

I started off with Jungle Disk (very inexpensive) so I could retrieve something if I deleted it by accident, but Andrea pointed out that if you have a hard-drive failure, you really only want what was on it at the time of the crash. So I added Carbonite for that purpose.

[Stacy Tegner]

Thanks, Brenda ~ I'm going to look into both. I use a laptop for about 95% of my transcript work and a desktop for some but also for invoicing, PDFs, etc. Do you know if you can back up more than one computer ~ I'm guessing you can for additional charges.

[Brenda Rogers]

Yeah, I don't know. I only have the one computer. To give you an idea of the Jungle Disk, though, my last bill was $3.something. Was like $15 to start? I mean, seriously, no money! It's through Amazon, so it's not going anywhere.