Fax – Fax To Email – Blog

The primarily target of the Internet fax is to function as a “fax to e-mail” service. This not only brings ecological benefits by skipping the tons of wasted paper but also leads to much easier management of the incoming faxes. You can easily separate all your faxes to different folders of your e-mail client or you can download them as files to your local computer. That way the organization of data is much simpler than searching through hundreds of lists of paper.

Choosing the Internet fax service to replace the regular “paper fax” gives many benefits but also brings new responsibilities. What about the security of your faxes? It’s not impossible; however very rare situation to really loose a paper fax. On the other side the electronic faxes can be deleted and lost with a single press on the delete button on the keyboard. A crash on the mail exchange server in your office can lead to loosing all your e-mails, including the faxes. This means that keeping a secure backup of your faxes is a must!

Making secure backups of faxes can be very expensive for small office and requires qualified staff for management of the servers. For that reason people usually keep their faxes both on their e-mail servers and as local copies on their hard drive. That way the faxes are kept in two locations and the information can be recovered even if one of the computer systems crashes. Unityfax.com is a leading fax to e-mail provider that helps you to improve your backups one step further. There is an option for keeping all recent faxes on a secure location called “secure storage”. This is a special password protected area on servers with high quality hardware and maintained by qualified administrators in the Unityfax data-center. These faxes can be easily accessed from the users (after authentication) through the web with a browser. It has a web interface which helps you to browse, download and read your faxes sorted in folders by date:

It provides a useful “Search” function which helps you to find faxes. For flexibility you are also able to manage the names of the folders, add new folders and move faxes from one folder to another:

The secure storage area on the Unityfax servers is also a very flexible alternative way to manage faxes; however we would like to seriously note that it is primarily intended to be a “backup of recent faxes” and not a “permanent storage”. Even if you choose to use the secure storage instead of e-mail (this is not unusual and many Unityfax customers prefer it) you must know that you should keep a copy of your faxes in your e-mail or/and on your local hard drive too! There are different short and long term storage solutions that allow you to recover your faxes from the secure website; however in all of them you should know – older faxes are permanently removed from the server. The current (by January 2011) secure storage options are the following:

1. 30 days – This is the default selection which is automatically included with all fax accounts. The faxes received in the last 30 days can be recovered through the website. Faxes older than 30 days are removed;
2. 6 months – This is the most popular option that gives 6 months of secure storage.  If you need more than 30 days of storage, but long term storage is not necessary, this is your best option.  You can recover any faxes that you have received in the last 180 days;
3. 12 months – The faxes from the last 365 days can be recovered with this option. This can be useful for organizations which maintain their documentation on an annual basis;
4. 24 months – For those who require long term secure storage and want to ensure their faxes are recoverable for 2 years after they have been received, this is the best option.

Everyone’s requirements are slightly different and the secure storage choices have been designed to accommodate these needs. Of course there is also an option to disable the secure storage. That way the faxes will be sent only by e-mail and there will be no files stored on the Unityfax servers at all. This can be done from the administrative control panel with a simple check-box:

As you can see the Unityfax secure storage option is a flexible way for both backup and fax management. It is very easy to use and it can be accessed from different locations with a simple web browser. This is an additional benefit for people who do not use web-based e-mails and may not have access to their e-mail all the time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 16th, 2011 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Fax To Email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.