Hi Barbara,
 
I usually work on a figure of 10,000 A4 pages in a 4 drawer filing cabinet.
 
1.5 million single page documents would therefore be 150 filing cabinets.
But you don't give an average number of pages per document, so multiply the number of cabinets accordingly.
 
 
Another rule-of-thumb is a 4 drawer cabinet = half a gigabyte. Your 400gb of documents would therefore take 800 filing cabinets.
 
 
Steve Norris
Alliance Document Solutions Ltd.
http://www.alliancegroup.co.uk
 
-----Original Message-----
From: The UK Records Management mailing list [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of McGrath, Barbara
Sent: 24 May 2006 11:48
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: How do you illustrate the voulume of digitally borne documents in a physical form ?

Hi,  I want to illustrate the volume of digitally borne (eg WORD, PDF, jpgs) in a physical form i.e. what would 1.5 million documents stored on a shared network drive look like or another comparison is what would 400Gb of documents stored on a shared network drive look like.  I am looking for a physical comparison to what this would look like in paper form. A comparison in say, length or volume would be good e.g. documents laid end to end would be “x” miles or a comparison in size say, it would fill “x” (full length) filling cabinets.

 

Does anyone have any nifty formulas for working out a rough comparison from digitally borne documents into a physical form ? 

 

Thank you,

 

Barbara McGrath

Information Officer

Fareham Borough Council

www.fareham.gov.uk

01329 824529

 



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