POR-02 · Offices and portals

Keeping your own copies of portal files

A document downloaded from a portal is evidence of what that portal said on a given day. Portals get rebuilt, files get renamed and links rot; the copy you keep, dated and verified, is the record that survives the redesign.

Published 6 September 2026 · The Georgia Records Desk editorial team

Portals are not archives

A government portal is a publishing system, not a preservation system. Its job is to serve the current version; when a site is reorganized, old URLs break and superseded files disappear from public reach even though they still exist in a records office somewhere.

The statewide portal described in this guide’s page on Georgia’s services front door is a moving index of forms and links. What it pointed at last year is not guaranteed to be what it points at now.

Why keep a local copy?

Because the copy you pulled is the version you relied on. If a fee schedule changes, a form is revised or a page is taken down, your dated copy is proof of what the document said when you acted on it. That is the same reason this desk dates the day each source was read.

For anything you will cite later, the local copy plus a note of the URL and the pull date is the minimum viable citation. Households that move files between their own machines learn the same habit in miniature: a guide to sharing files directly between your own computers makes the point that what you keep is only worth what you can verify.

Without the copy, the citation is a pointer to whatever the portal says today.

How do you know a copy is unchanged?

A checksum answers the question a filename cannot. Two files with the same name can differ; two files with the same hash are the same file. Recording the hash of a downloaded PDF when you save it lets you prove later that the document you cite is the document you pulled.

The check is cheap enough to be routine. Save the file, record its hash in the same note that holds the URL and the pull date, and the next time the document matters you can confirm the copy is still the copy, not a truncated download or an edited version.

What belongs in the note?

Four fields make a downloaded document citable: the URL it came from, the date it was pulled, the office that published it and a filename you can still read in a year. “Budget ordinance, City of X, pulled 2026-09-12” beats “document (7).pdf” every time.

Where the document supports a request or an argument, add the sentence of context: which meeting it came from, or which request produced it. That note is what turns a download into a record.

When the portal copy disappears

A vanished file is a records question, not a dead end. The office that published the document still holds it or knows where it went; asking for the prior version is an ordinary request, and the mechanics and costs are the ones this guide lays out in what a request costs.

Your local copy does double duty in that conversation: it names exactly which version you are asking about, which is the information the office needs to find it.

Keeping the collection readable

A folder of public documents is a small archive, and it earns the same habits: consistent names, one folder per office or topic, and no copies edited after the fact. If you annotate, annotate a copy. The original stays as pulled, because its integrity is its value.

What gta.georgia.gov is

The Georgia Technology Authority runs the state’s web and technology programs, including the platform behind georgia.gov and the standards state sites follow. Its pages explain who builds and maintains the portals this page treats as sources, which is why a rebuild there is a site redesign and not the disappearance of the underlying records.