10 Yr old design missing

I lettered a truck in 1998 and the guy wanted me to redo the cut vinyl on his 86 work truck again. (funny part is it was on a zip drive to) but it was easy because it was on an old hard drive in my desk. But I put up a sign in the shop that says "We only keep the last 2 years of art work, before we have to charge an art fee" I know digitized art is a pain to keep up with (especially if you are not diligent about customer folder and back ups) but that is why the customer keeps coming back.

don't make customer unhappy, I will digitize logo for $45.00 up to 5" unlimited stiches. make customer happy

UOTE=Robert Young;152339]Client upset because our website does not have a design from 2004 on it. Now this customer has not used our services in 2 years.. so middle of 2012 was their last order.

2004 is when we started our website, back then very few digitizers even had a web presence. That was our transition year. Before then everything was email driven and our storage was ZIP drives... lol .. well try to access a ZIP drive today!! If you don't even know what a ZIP drive is , then point has been made!

So why upset though? You haven't used us in over 2 years yet you think we should have kept a 10 year old design for you "just in case"?? now after 2004 the designs are on the website so those are saved unless a client has not used us in 36 months then we delete the account.

what is your policy? realizing that most have not been around as long as we have.

I've been digitizing since 1996 and I have every design that I've ever done. Almost 16,000 of them not including stock designs. I hang onto them for exactly that reason. There have been several times throughout the years where customers have lost everything. Usually through a computer crash, but once because of a flood, and once because of a tornado believe it or not.

I don't think its realistic to ask a digitizer to hang onto files forever, but I do anyway...

i'm one person, not a team. ;)

yeah, kind of unrealistic to hang onto paper tape! but embroidery files don't take up that much space. all my files only take up about 5gb, and that's with a back-up copy of most so i don't mind hanging onto them, especially now that lots of computers come with 1 tb of storage.

i had a zip drive but never liked it. i had an external hard drive that moved a little faster.