June 6

Disk Space Wasted by Attorneys and Accountants

Are you a disk space abuser? Every law firm and accounting firm I’ve ever seen is. The e-mail signature and disclaimers are such a waste.

After receiving a message from one today, I thought I’d take about 5 minutes to figure out how much disk waste is produced by a small firm over a three year period. In a very un-scientific way…(see the Google Spreadsheet)

Let’s say the average attorney or accountant sends 25 messages per hour, works 9 hour days, 5 days per week. The e-mail signature is 5KB.

In one year, that person generates over 275 megs of trash.

If the average firm has 25 staff and we consider a storage time of seven years for all messages (wouldn’t want to be sued!), then we’re up to 49 Gigs of extra storage.

Nice.

Don’t forget that the law/accounting firm is storing 49 Gigs of sent mail AND they are adding 49 Gigs to the various recipients of the messages, too.

I’m not claiming my estimation of the e-mails sent per day, staff size, and other constants are good data, but it does serve a purpose to show how much wasted space they could have.

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