What a well-built electronic archive actually means
The difference between a shared folder and an electronic archive is not storage space, but structure. An archive has a records retention schedule: the list of document categories the company creates or receives, each with its own retention period. It has a fund — the entirety of the documents created by the company — split into inventories, usually by year and by department. And it has an archival unit: the file that groups documents of the same type from the same period. 4docs.net reproduces exactly this logic in digital form. When you upload a document, you choose its category from the records schedule, and the platform automatically works out where it belongs and how long it must be kept. The result is an archive that stays organized on its own, instead of degrading as it grows.
How to bring the archive you already have into the platform
Almost no company starts from zero: there are physical files in storage, scans scattered across folders, attachments left in someone's inbox. Migration starts with a map of what you have: which document categories exist, for which years, in what volume. Digital documents are uploaded in bulk, with a mapping between your existing folder names and the categories in the records schedule, so the old structure isn't lost but translated. Paper documents are scanned progressively, starting with the ones consulted frequently and the ones approaching their retention deadline. For every archival unit, the physical reference is also kept — shelf, box, file — so you can go straight from a search result to the paper document, for as long as it still exists.
The deposit does not disappear when the archive goes digital
The National Archives Act does not only require you to know WHAT you keep, but WHERE. For as long as the paper files exist, somebody has to be able to say immediately which box, which shelf and which repository holds a given archival unit — and an inspection checks exactly that. In 4docs.net the deposit is a real structure: repository, room, shelf, rack, box, each with its code and, if you want, its declared capacity, so a box cannot be given more than it holds. Every box can print its own label, listing the units inside. When a file leaves the deposit it leaves with a record: who took it, what for, until when — and files not returned on time are listed separately, because a file that left and never came back is the one way an archive genuinely loses documents. Consultation on the premises is recorded separately from an actual loan, because the risk is not the same. And movements between a department and the archive, to the National Archives or to a contracted external repository are recorded through handover minutes, with the list of units and the number of sheets — not through e-mails and memory.
How long each document must be kept
Retention periods are not uniform and cannot be guessed. Accounting Law (Law 82/1991) requires, as a rule, that registers and supporting documents be kept for 10 years, and payroll records for 50 years — because employment history is reconstructed from them. For some financial-accounting documents, the regulation sets a shorter period of 5 years (OMFP Order 2634/2015). Other categories have periods set through the records schedule approved by the company, following the logic of the National Archives Law (Law 16/1996). In 4docs.net, the retention period is a property of the category, not of the file: you set it once in the records schedule and it applies automatically to every document that falls under it, and the expiry alert arrives beforehand, not after.
The legal validity of an electronically archived document
A scan dropped into a folder does not, by itself, carry evidentiary value. Law 135/2007, which governs the archiving of documents in electronic form, ties legal validity to a framework: the archived document must be intact, identifiable, accompanied by metadata and accessible throughout the retention period, and the electronic archive must be administered under the conditions set by law. 4docs.net gives you the part that depends on internal discipline: mandatory metadata, an integrity fingerprint calculated on upload, an access log and automatically applied retention. For documents that the law requires to be signed, signing is done separately — for contract management and digital signing, see the sister platform 4mycontracts.net.
