I have a USB drive/stick that I record and save all my Notary Public/Signing Agent business which includes loan docs and scans. I don’t keep anything regarding my business on my computer now. My PC died a couple of years ago and I had not backed up my files. I learned from that experience to keep whatever is important on a separate portable disk. All that being said, I do keep the loan docs and the few scans of loan docs until I’m paid. It’s not unusual for title to blame you for a missing doc when in fact, they’ve ruined it somehow and need it replaced, or a few times the doc was left out of the package by mistake and they don’t want to accept the responsibility for the mistake. Be sure to review your scan to make sure all pages scanned correctly (which I’m sure most everyone is doing) before you send the file to title.
Generally I would scan what they want and then send the hard copies next day. They need the hard copies that are signed and the customer keeps his hard copy. The only reason I ever scanned is because they had a last minute closing and probably wanted to make sure they had all the documentation signed correctly etc. and I only sent them the criticals. I did keep the docs in my computer files until I was paid though.
However, I would have charged trip fee for going back to re-sign. I did have an incident where a vendor said they didn’t receive the originals from ups. After going back to my ups guys and checking with them to see if they had it in their log and then went back home and checked again I told them that docs were shipped and sent a photo of ups log…
there was nothing else I could do. I called them a couple weeks later and they had received the docs but sent them off to the wrong office. They never called to tell me that they found them.
But then the pandemic came along and I decided to retire. Miss the extra money but not the grief. It seems like when I started doing this 5-6 years ago to supplement my SS, the companies had it together a lot more than they do now. Lots of turnover in the business and they are paying less and less and notaries are working for less. Some pretty high fees going around now but not worth getting covid to me.