Minnesota: Public record or public burden? As Legislature seeks to clarify email-retention rules, local agencies push back

Peggy Scott held up a bankers box that can hold about 2,750 sheets of paper. Then she held up a small 512-gigabyte flash drive that costs about $20 and holds nearly 10,000 pages of documents, and a picture of a 5 terabyte external hard drive, which costs about $120.

“Government agencies used to have to stores these [boxes] in basements and rent out spaces,” Scott said. “[The hard drive] would hold half the print collection of the Library of Congress.”

The Republican state representative from Andover was trying to show how modern technology has both increased the number of electronic records created every day, but also how it has made it much simpler and cheaper to store those records.

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