Best storage concept for HOA records

Started by GeorgeS21 • 6 replies • 853 views

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GeorgeS21 (Florida)
Posts: 3,808

Posted:

Reminder - 189 single family houses, voluntary association, deeded CC&Rs, in Florida. I am a non-resident owner who has a couple of rented houses in the neighborhood. I am also on the Board and am the Secretary.

I have completed a pretty thorough search for records of the Association.

Four Phases of buildout, with developer turnover in late 1995.

We have, I believe:
- full minutes of Board and Annual meetings from 2016-2018
- partial Board minutes from 2015, but no Annual meeting
- a couple of board meeting minutes from 2014, but no annual
- a couple of board meeting minutes from 2009-2010
- spotty financial statements that generally align with the above
- nothing else due to a series of events including the untimely death of a President several years ago; his family cleared out the house within days including, we believe the administrative records of the neighborhood

This "is what it is." I have reconstructed what we have, filed and archived paper copies, scanned everything.

We'll obviously maintain what we have more carefully - at least as long as I am Secretary.

I am looking for a way to ensure the current paper records, and any portable digital records are not lost forever.

Does anyone use a free storage ("cloud") server for this sort of thing?

Thanks!

MelissaP1 (Alabama)
Posts: 13,836

Posted:

My bank offers a "cloud" service with certain bank accounts. Never use mine but it's available. Safe deposit box may be a good idea for some of the important documents. Not sure other online services are available. May want to google them.

Former HOA President

RichardP13 (California)
Posts: 3,868

Posted:

All you need to do is search the internet for "free" cloud service, but make sure other know how to use a computer.

TimB4 (Tennessee)
Posts: 21,059

Posted:

George,

We put everything on the Associations website. This provides a cloud storage of sort (but we pay for it).

We also burn data DVDs every year. Additionally, thumb drives are used in addition to paper copies

One goal could be to store everything.
Our goal is the ability to recreate. For example: Although we backup our financial records, our deposit slips show the lot number. This way, using bank records, we could recreate ledgers.

GenoS (Florida)
Posts: 4,276

Posted:

Some of us recommended a cloud storage service last year - well known and highly rated but not one of the top 3 most popular ones - which was running a holiday special: lifetime business account for $169 that included 2 TB of storage. The board voted against it. Instead, the secretary set up a personal drop box cloud account, which is explicitly not meant for business use, and started to upload our scanned archived records to it. We hit the 3 GB limit before we were even half done uploading so that idea was a bust. We currently have nothing online but we do burn DVDs every year and also have a number of flash drives made up that are in the hands of the directors. I believe a flash drive is also sent to our attorney every year who stores it for a small annual fee in case we ever lost everything else. Another drawback of the small free personal cloud storage accounts is some of them will terminate the account and delete your data IF there is a long period of inactivity on the account. You need to read the fine print of the user agreement carefully to avoid a situation like that. If that lifetime annual deal is offered again later this year I'll push for it, again.

LetA (Nevada)
Posts: 2,679

Posted:

Technology is rapidly changing, so it can seem confusing to nail down one fool proof method where do don't have to spend association money on new
computers, equipment every 2-5 years. It seems that tablets and smartphones are here to stay.

Which way do you want to go? are you finding that your needs are taking documents like ARC request and needing to convert them to digital PDF format?

To avoid any issues of impropriety, use only association owned equipment, Digital voice recorders are great ways to record the meetings and they quickly transfer to
a computer in a mp3 type sound file. I find that the Mac Air laptop computer is inexpensive, about $1000.00 and you can buy Office 360 for Mac to write MS word documents
or use the Mac OS based word processing program and save the documents to MS format extensions. PS I'm using the same 10 year old Mac and this thing is a workhorse. The NEAT Desk organizer is a great scanner and "office" workhorse
quality which will provide many years of service. As for printers, they are a dime a dozen and don't provide nearly the same life of service for mass quantities of printing.
For printing and collating I would use Staples or Office Max, As for the storage, you can find portable 1TB hard drives for under $100.00, I would suggest getting a digital hard drive over the old spinning disks type.

This is what I would do If we were self managed.

GeorgeS21 (Florida)
Posts: 3,808

Posted:

Thanks for all the ideas ...

I’m going to be putting everything on a flash drive ...maybe even have a backup flash drive with both treasurer and the secretary.

Also looking at online storage as a tertiary method - there are several pay as you go options, but the concern is who goes out of biz, is purchased in an M and A biz deal, etc ...

Will have paper copies too, since big boxes are harder to lose - but, the HOA has shown this is clearly possible.

I’ve got a trial website up from the sponsor of hoatalk, but I can even get the board members to create accounts to test how it works.

Sad.

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