Archive comes from the Latin archivum, although its most remote origin is in the Greek language and can be translated as “residence of magistrates”. The term is used to name the ordered set of documents that a company, institution or person produces in the framework of its activities and functions.
For example: “I do not remember when we signed the contract: I am going to go to the archive to confirm it”, “I have a faultless track record, all you have to do is go to the archive and check it out for yourself”, “This journalist is recognized for keeping the archive more important about Uruguayan cinema ”.
The place where important documents for an organization are kept is also known with the file name: “The General Archive of the Nation preserves thousands of texts that are a valuable testimony of national history”, “You can find more information in the archive of the Congress ”, “ A fire in the theater archive destroys the original scripts of the most famous plays ”.
Several decades ago, files were exclusively physical, since the technology necessary to store them digitally did not exist; before the companies began to enter their documents in databases, they had immense warehouses full of high shelves, in which boxes and folders were kept, fighting in vain against the deterioration of time.
Throughout this digitization process, many companies discovered that they had lost part of their files due to the action of humidity, which produces the decomposition of matter that is later populated by fungi and devoured by insects. On the other hand, depending on the type of ink used, some old documents may show loss of sharpness, to the point of having become practically illegible.
It is worth mentioning that, for different reasons, certain books and documents cannot be discarded to be replaced by a digital version, since they have a historical value that requires their preservation in physical format. However, the transfer of its content to a computer, as well as its scanning to be viewed in three dimensions, are ideal to decrease its deterioration and allow people to review and observe it as many times as they wish.
The action and effect of filing (saving documents, terminating a matter) can be mentioned as a file: “The secretary has already delivered the documentation so I will proceed to file it”, “The family of the victim is furious as the court ordered the case file. ”
In the field of computing, a file is a set of digital information that can be stored on a computer or other type of device: “Please ask Ruben to email the file to me again since I never received it.”, “It is a very heavy file: it will take a long time to download. ”
Each type of content usually requires a different file class to suit your needs: text is not stored in the same way as an image or video. However, within each class there are also various alternatives, which usually impact the space they occupy on disk; This is because computer science offers as many options to carry out a task as human ideas have, and every time a method arises to save and load information more efficiently, the size of the files is reduced.
On the other hand, there are tools capable of compressing files; Among the best known are WinRAR, WinZIP and 7-ZIP. With their help it is possible to considerably reduce the size of certain documents, although in some cases, such as high definition videos and images that have already been optimized, they are not very effective.
