Archiving of Digitizing

There are many different views on what responsibility a designer has to archive their customer’s work. My views on this topic might seem contradictory, because I draw a line between what I should be expected to do, and what I’m willing to do as a service to our customers. As with most other industries, when you walk out the door with your product, it is yours to have and to hold. If you lose it or drop it, that’s extremely poor luck, but you can’t return to where you purchased it and say, “I’m really sorry, but I lost the (blank) I purchased from you, can I have another one?” On the other hand, I feel a designer is best suited to safeguard embroidery files, even though their customers should value their own investments enough to safeguard them.

To properly archive files requires a quality backup system, time and attention to detail. When the customer calls in a panic, hoping we have a copy of their file, we tell them it’s highly likely, because we do archive all of our customers work as a service to them. There is a fee to retrieve a file though, because there is a considerable amount of time involved in locating the file, restoring it to disk, saving it to a disk and mailing the disk or in most cases emailing it. These are all small tasks, but together they can take 15-30 minutes to complete. We safeguard our customer files, but we also charge for this service when the customer needs to use it. Customers understand this and are so grateful we have a copy of their file, that they never question our services.