I was recently talking to a person who has been in the electronic document imaging/management field for many years. He said that one of his customers was convinced that PDF’s were a good way to store their important documents long term.
He said “that I heard a ‘Expert’ speak recently and he inferred that with the proliferation of PDF creation software by MANY vendors that the validity of the PDF format has been degraded for long term storage and potential inclusion into an IMS/EDMS…”. This is a good point, will a PDF document that has been stored outside of a managed document management system be admissible in court as a legal document? I think that they will not because of the potential of alteration.
Here was my response to the question “are PDF’s a good format for long term document storage?”:
“Have your client do a few Google searches and they will know the answer.
Examples (using the “‘s as show below will search of the exact occurance of these words):
“corrupt PDF” – 377,000 results
“corrupt TIFF” – 4,620
“can’t open PDF” 1,230,000
“can’t open TIFF” 16,4000
“pdf virus” 69,900
“TIFF virus” 299
“PDF error” 299,000
“TIFF error” 8,300
I think the facts speak for themselves.”
If you are storing your important documents as PFF’s on your network (no using a document management system such as Laserfiche) I think you will find out sometime in the future that these documents are really of no value.
scanning and storing pdf’s can be a dangerous practice