Shredding Services from a Document Shredding Company

Since the last three decades, Allshred Services has been providing the best shredding services. These services include both off-site and on-site shredding services. Fortune 500 companies to banks, hospitals to law firms, all realize the necessity of document shredding services these days. Allshred Services is a document shredding company that helps their clients maintain the current records in a database and eliminate any redundant data that lies in the form of documents. Any data that is transferred to the electronic media or the web (such as Drop Box, One Drive, or Google Drive) also becomes a candidate for shredding.

Sometimes the data needs to be moved before it is shredded. In such cases, the consultants from the company prepare a list of all the items that are to be moved, and then cross-check them.  After this the documents are moved from the client site to the company where they are with time shredded. The company also issues a Certificate of Destruction to the client after every shredding that takes place, whether off-site or on-site.

What type of Shredding Service to Choose?

Before you opt for a service, consider answering this question. For different types of documents, you may have to choose from a variety of services that are available to you. 

1. Off-site: Choose Off-site shredding service if the documents that are to be shredded do not contain information that could lead unauthorized personnel accessing your records. In off-site shredding, the company moves the documents from clients’ sites to the company site where they are shredded. It is entirely up to the shredding company when to shred the documents.
2. On-site: The client requests a shredding company to bring the shredding devices to the client site so that the documents are shredded on-site. In such a case, the client has full transparency of the entire procedure as an authorized person of the client can monitor the procedure.

It’s not always true that the documents will be shredded according to the request of the client. When documents to be shredded are not much in quantity, they can be shredded on-site. However if they are in bulk, then off-site shredding of the documents is recommended.  The bulk documents are then transported in large containers to the company site for shredding.

Shredding Devices

Besides the ways of shredding, there are different devices that are used for shredding. The earliest of the shredding devices (and we all may have used it at one time or another) was the scissor. However, with the need for shredding not limited to homes, new types of shredders came into being, each one of them adding more features than its predecessor. Generally, there are two kinds of shredders these days. They are:

1. Mobile Shredding Truck: Shredding companies use them to provide shredding services to their client’s on-site. The truck is mounted with an industrial size paper shredder, and has storage space for the shredded documents. The types of documents or devices that can be shredded by such units include CDs, DVDs, hard drives, credit cards, and uniforms, among other things.
2. Kiosks: A shredding kiosk allows public access to an industrial capacity-shredding machine. A kiosk allows the public to use the privately owned shredder by paying for every shredding. The public need not buy the shredder itself.

Shredding Methods

Just like there are various shredding devices, the methods of shredding are also different. These are:

• Strip-cut: These types of shredders use knives to shred the paper as long as the original sheet of paper exists.
• Cross-cut: These types of shredders use contra-rotating drums to cut paper into various shapes.
• Particle-cut: Such shredders disintegrate the entire document to tiny-bits of paper.
• Cardboard: Used for shredding uneven material.
• Disintegrators: Such shredders keep on cutting the paper repeatedly until the tiny-paper pieces can pass through a mesh.
• Hammer mills: Hammer mills pound the paper to shred it.
• Pierce and Tear: Such shredders first pierce the paper with rotating blades and then tear the paper apart.
• Grinders: Grinders grind the paper using a rotating shaft and cutting blades until the tiny bits of paper can pass through a screen.

Unshredding

Just like we hear of deleting and un-deleting, formatting and un-formatting, the same way there is shredding and un-shredding. However, un-shredding of documents happens only in certain special circumstances. Unshredding depends on how successfully the shredding has been done, and what are the resources that have been put into reconstruction of the documents. The reconstruction of the documents depends upon the following:

• Size of the text
• Size of the shredded pieces
• The orientation of the source documents
• Whether the shredded document is single-sided or double-sided
• How much are the shredded pieces further randomized

Sometimes, there is no need for the shredded documents to be un-shredded. They can be read by using forensic methods.