I personally believe forms of writing and record keeping are far, far older than we think, having been discovered and forgotten repeatedly. Very hard for something hundreds of thousands of years old to be preserved. Once you can pass on information orally and written through the generations, knowledge will always improve.
Record keeping doesn't need writing. Like Incas with their knotted ropes (probably not how how you call it in English). Also, while some central Asians could read and write (they had courrier relay to deliver letters), their administrative/taxing/military system, the decimal system, worked without any writing for two thousand years, only by making a mark on a wooden branch for each person in an Arban, a mark on anoth…
I'd strongly suggest not getting bogged down in the details of what various forms of notional recording are --- ink on paper, etching on stone, holes punched in paper, magnetic field alignments in rust (spinning, sequential, or otherwise), bitfields in memory arrays, holographic images ...
Records are created by varying matter in space to transmit messages over time.
Signals are created by varying energy in time to transmit messages over space.
Or expanded slightly:
Signals transmit encoded symbolic messages from a transmitter across space through a channel by variations in energy over time to a receiver potentially creating a new record.
Records transmit encoded symbolic messages from a writer through a substrate across time by variations in matter over space to a reader potentially creating a new signal.