My home office is a bit cluttered–or if you ask my wife, a disaster–but I usually know where everything is. The key word there is “usually”. Just yesterday, I was looking for a piece of paper that I remembered filing away several months ago, and I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I searched through my file cabinets, under the top layer of papers on my desk, and then started rooting through the trash can. I looked in the spare room upstairs where I keep old files I don’t need any more. I checked the basement. I never did find it.

I attributed the loss to running a home office, saying to myself, “if I worked for somebody else in a big corporation, this would never happen.” They always have systems, backups, and some way to find all the information they need at a moment’s notice.

Or do they?

Here’s a statistic that’s seriously worth thinking about: In a survey conducted by independent research firm eMediaUSA for GFI Software, only 29 percent of US respondents said it would take them less than an hour to find all emails relating to a business transaction that took place 15 months ago. Five percent said it would take them more than three days; four percent, more than a week; and a shocking 17 percent said there would be no chance of finding it at all.

And this is from small and midsize businesses that should know better.

The survey also indicated that 53 percent of US SMBs do not use email archiving, despite the obvious need–but only seven percent did not see the need to use email archiving. Sixty-two percent said email archiving was important or very important, and only one percent described their email archiving experiences as negative.

Besides the legal and possible compliance issues involved that may necessitate use of email archiving, there’s just the convenience factor–not to mention the issue of disaster recovery. A surprising number of respondents stored email correspondence on their email server. You may be putting email archiving on the back burner, but one thing’s for sure–you’ll regret it when the boss walks into your office and says “Hey, remember when we sent that email to that big prospect we met at the conference last year? Pull that up for me, will ya?”