Paper is just about the easiest thing to lose over the years and it certainly doesn’t last forever. You are one bit of water damage, one fire, one break-in,… away from losing it all permanently with paper.
Same argument can be made about a hard drive, or a data tape, which is why I think we can all agree backups are vital in every type of archival action.
Backups are great for digital files yeah… Are you actually running your notes through a copier twice every time you change something important and running one of the copies to external storage?
No, I have several notebooks allocated for various types of importance - one for writing down everything, one in which I write down things which are relevant but not important long-term, and two in which I keep copies of the notes I need to keep. I just write it twice.
If you’re asking about official documents, then yes. I keep at least* two legalised copies of everything (always separate) and 5 generic photocopies of each document in case anyone needs it on file for whatever reason.
Again, these aren’t new arguments against storage environments, we’ve literally been doing bureaucracy for centuries.
Edit: to add, this is fretting over potentialities, I have lost precisely zero documents to water damage in three decades, so has my family for decades before that. Not saying it can’t happen, just saying it’s pretty easy to keep paper copies safe and usable for ridiculous amounts of time.
Paper is just about the easiest thing to lose over the years and it certainly doesn’t last forever. You are one bit of water damage, one fire, one break-in,… away from losing it all permanently with paper.
Same argument can be made about a hard drive, or a data tape, which is why I think we can all agree backups are vital in every type of archival action.
Backups are great for digital files yeah… Are you actually running your notes through a copier twice every time you change something important and running one of the copies to external storage?
No, I have several notebooks allocated for various types of importance - one for writing down everything, one in which I write down things which are relevant but not important long-term, and two in which I keep copies of the notes I need to keep. I just write it twice.
If you’re asking about official documents, then yes. I keep at least* two legalised copies of everything (always separate) and 5 generic photocopies of each document in case anyone needs it on file for whatever reason.
Again, these aren’t new arguments against storage environments, we’ve literally been doing bureaucracy for centuries.
Edit: to add, this is fretting over potentialities, I have lost precisely zero documents to water damage in three decades, so has my family for decades before that. Not saying it can’t happen, just saying it’s pretty easy to keep paper copies safe and usable for ridiculous amounts of time.