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5.3.1. Disposing of Records
Effective information management includes knowing what information to maintain and how to get rid of it when
it's no longer required.
Regular disposal (e.g. annual) and the consequent archiving, destroying, or moving inactive records to intermediate
storage facilities enables office space to be used more effectively and, by reducing the total volume of records,
enables active records to be accessed quickly and easily. Disposing does not always mean destruction. Some data
needs to be transferred to other ownership and may be obligatory as per the law or the agency.
Disposition versus Destruction
Note that destruction is not the same as disposition.
• Disposition refers to the wide range of actions undertaken to manage records over time, which may include
retention, destruction, or transfer to archival storage. All disposition procedures must adhere to established
regulations and satisfy UN record-keeping obligations.
• Destruction is the act of disposing of records permanently by obliterating records so that the information
in them can no longer be physically or electronically reconstructed or recovered. Before taking any action,
destruction choices must be formally approved.
Destroying data means it can no longer be read by an operating system or application. Simply deleting a file
is insufficient. When you delete a file on an electronic device, you may not be able to see it any longer, but
the information is still stored on the device’s hard drive or memory chip. Data destruction entails overwriting
the current data with random data until the current data can no longer be retrieved, or actually destroying the
electronic medium.
Most of the Government and private institutions have their own set of guidelines on how to get rid of data that is
no longer necessary to keep.
The Destruction of Records Act, 1917 (India): An Act to consolidate and amend the law providing for the
destruction or other disposal of certain documents in the custody or control of Courts and Revenue and other
public officers.
The majority of office records are not worth keeping permanently: only 5-10 percent of an organisation’s
records have enduring value. In order to determine which records can be destroyed, it is necessary to establish
formal records retention schedules. Retention schedules are comprehensive policies that identify how long
records will be kept and whether they have enduring value.
Types of Records
There are two possible ways you may have kept the information– in the digital format or as a physical copy.
Recommended Destruction Methods for Digital/Electronic Records
Once you are done with the job and you no longer need the user data, you can go ahead and clean out the data
from the memory. It's crucial to realise that the information you may have is most vulnerable on the internet. With
the increased amount and intensity of cyber-attacks, it is important for all of us to ensure that we properly destroy
the digital data. This helps us prevent unauthorised access to the data.
Even when the data is being stored on your device, you can encrypt the data to make sure that even in the case of
a data leak, hackers are not able to read your data.
You can also format the computer drive/hard disk where the client’s confidential data was stored for a clean
discarding.
1. Please note that in most of the devices, if you do a soft delete of a particular file, this file removes data from the
original place and gets stored in a temporary folder from where one can easily restore these files. Hence, it is
important that confidential data is cleaned out or formatted from the disk permanently and nobody can recover
the files we destroyed.
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