“There’s an app for that!” It’s a phrase the modern American consumer hears countless times a week. Indeed, it is amazing just how much they we can do with our pocket-sized digital wonder-gadgets. Yet some tasks cannot be trusted to smartphone apps.
As providers of document recovery services, we’d like to explain why you shouldn’t trust your smartphone app to provide backups of your company’s most important documents.
1. Not enough detail for high-quality reproduction.
Smartphone apps generally use the phone’s camera to capture and straighten document images. In order to produce readable text, the document must be photographed in good light. Even then, fine detail and colors will be lost. Apps like CamScanner and JotNotScanner Pro are great when you want to scan a business card for later consultation, but because they can’t create high-quality scans, document recovery services do not consider them to be a viable backup solution.
2. Smart phones are not reliable for long-term storage.
Although it is possible to set up cloud sharing through scanning apps, most users will probably just keep scans on their phones’ memory cards. Phones cannot be relied on for long-term storage; their operating systems are unstable, and a single exposure to water can render a phone unusable. Disaster recovery firms know how to restore wet documents, but there’s little they or anyone else can do to restore your busted mobile phone. If you’re hoping to back up a business receipt now and then, a scanning app will probably suffice. However, for key business documents, it is unwise to rely on your phone’s storage.
3. Not feasible for high-volume document scanning.
Scanning apps aren’t designed to allow fast high-volume scanning. When backing up your business documents, you will want a process that doesn’t take too much time and that easily produces high-quality copies. After all, if your goal is to protect your firm against the need for document recovery services, you will probably need to scan thousands of documents, including client files, contracts, employee information, banking records and more. Scanning all of those critical documents with a cell phone app would take hundreds of hours. From a cost perspective, it is much smarter to contract for scanning from a professional provider of disaster recovery services, such as Polygon.
By all means, it makes sense to use a smartphone scanning app when you just need a quick-and-dirty copy of a certain document. This approach can save paper and toner while allowing you to access documents on the go. However, for disaster preparation, smartphone apps cannot provide the proper quality or reliability that is required to reproduce critical business documents.
[ Photo by: merfam, via CC License ]
