Hard copies have significant risks themselves - They're vulnerable to misfiling, to mishandling, and perhaps most importantly, destruction - By natural disaster

Hard copies have significant risks themselves - They're vulnerable to misfiling, to mishandling, and perhaps most importantly, destruction - By natural disaster or human hands. A well organized archive can have much more redundancy, including georedundancy, for the same price. Further, it can have massively redundant metadata - Imagine if we had a reasonable checksum of every document in the archives of everyone who was interested - And then in the event the main archive was lost or offline, we could have a verified reconstruction from the archives of people who had copies of the metadata and partial copies of the data. https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973 https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973