Electronic records should be scheduled and disposed of in the normal course of business. As is true of records on other media, most electronic records are temporary and can be destroyed within 2 to 5 years after they become non-current. The management of electronic records with retention periods longer than 7 to 10 years involves some special considerations. The first of these is data migration. It can be expected that long-term data will have to be migrated to new media about every 5 years.
Data migration is expensive and erodes the original quality of the data.
Environmental issues become critical if electronic records have to be retained for longer than a year or two. Data quality and integrity must be sampled annually.