Backup archive when under property management?

Hi All,

Our 314 SFH community has always used a property manager ... we have fully archived minutes, letters, processes, etc.

My question: what happens wrt archives if they were to go out of business, or if a situation developed where we had to terminate them?

Should the Board be keeping an archive of records, should the PM have a contract mod to archive in a third location only accessible by the Board?

Good points, Shelia.

While I am concerned about unauthorized access (we have same firewall for POA internal docs as most), I was also considering the requirement for the Board to maintain records - even in statute, if I remember correctly.

Not much in open search ... this was interesting ... https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-associations-computer-records-storage-20170215-story.html

Another board member and I decided a few years ago to do a big records purge of stuff we had collecting in a storage room of our clubhouse for a dozen years. We kept everything from the previous 7 years (as had been the legal requirement at the time) and carefully tossed everything that was older, with certain exceptions. At that point we had everything sent out to be digitized (scanned). What we got back was 4 DVDs which we made 4 sets of duplicates from.

The board debated who should "hold on to them". We didn't have a management company, so that wasn't an option. We asked our law firm if they would keep a set for safekeeping. They were willing to do that, but then we changed lawyers and the new one was not willing to do it. A couple of board members agreed to keep a set in their homes but those were returned when they left the board.

We decided to buy a cheap (less than $500) computer and to copy the files onto a password-protected partition on its hard drive (maybe it's an SSD, I'm not sure). We then subscribed to a cloud storage service. Although there are "free" solutions from MS, Google, Apple, DropBox, etc. available, the GB we needed exceeded the free account limits.

We recognized that syncing the files with a cloud provider isn't "backup" per se, and that what we had would increase every year. But we never got around to doing anything further because a year later a new board was in place and no one on it had any real computer literacy. Mention "cloud" or "disaster recovery" and their eyes glazed over. Later that year they voted to mothball the computer we had purchased because no one knew how to use it (in fact, they mentioned me by name at a board meeting as the only person they'd ever seen using it). It's now sitting unplugged in a storeroom.

Worse, the secretarty/treasurer for the last couple of years prefers everything on paper. When vendors or our bookkeeper send her things via email attachments (usually PDF files) she prints them out and deletes the emails. So you can imagine how the plan to "scan everything into digitized form for archival purposes" had been going. The file cabinet in the locked clubhouse records closet is almost half full again after a couple of years.

There's nothing like putting in lots of time on a project only to see it tossed to the curb not long after. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice.... do whatever you want but don't come running to me when TSHTF.

Anyway, I don't have any proposed solution for you. I don't worry about that stuff anymore. Ask your management company about it and see if they'll sell you any offsite backup. Minimize physical paper.