How To Organize All Your Important Documents Online Safely

The days where the most convenient place to file all of your important documents was a metal file cabinet are gone. While you still may have a filing drawer for difficult-to-replace originals, if you truly want to keep your important papers safe and organized, you'll store all of your documents online in a secure system that can be accessed anywhere in the world. If you are stuck in your old ways, don't worry. Old habits can be hard to overcome, but once you see how convenient organizing your documents online can be, you won't get stuck with a pile of paper that continues to grow and take up space. Here are some tips on how to organize all of those confidential documents you have sitting around your home safely online:

#1: Scanning Your Physical Documents

Not all of the confidential or sensitive documents that you need to store will be saved as a file in your computer. This is why you'll need to take time to go through all of your physical documents so that you can identify what needs to be saved and what can be shed from your records. You'll want to save shot records, certificates and legal documents. The only physical documents or papers you should have left after scanning physical documents are items that you need the originals of. These documents, like your passport or birth certificate, should be stored in a fire-proof safe, and the scanned papers should be shredded.

#2: Organizing the Documents That You Already Have Saved on Your Computer

Now that you have gone through the physical papers, it's time to locate all of the documents you've saved on your computer over the years. If you have online legal forms, old tax returns, mileage logs from recent years, or anything that would be difficult to obtain online, you should keep the files in your computer and then take action to store these documents online.

Just because you organize your files that are saved on your computer or your laptop doesn't mean that the files are safe. If your computer crashes or the hard drive is wiped, you could lose everything without having any type of backups. This is why storing your files online is ideal when you want to stay organized. You can organize your files just like you would on your computer without any of the worries of losing documents that are private and important.

#3: Choose an Online Storage Solution

Saving files in an online platform is often referred to as saving documents in the cloud. There are a ton of different cloud-based office solutions that you can choose from with different file options, size limits, and organization options. Choose the right interface, create folders for each type of document, and title each file so that you can easily navigate through the platform when you're looking for something specific.

Computers and the Internet have changed the way households run. Today, you can download files on the Internet, sign them, and then store these same documents in the cloud where they can permanently be accessed.