There’s always a clear winner in the game rock paper scissors. Paper covers rock, rock breaks scissors, and so on. 

But what’s a winning strategy when it comes to preserving your precious files? Digital has lots of benefits, but a closer look reveals that, sometimes, paper is the clear winner.

It might seem strange to say that paper can beat digital when it comes to creating, storing, or backing up your important documents. We’re surrounded by tech companies practically throwing free digital storage at us. From iCloud to Dropbox and beyond, pretty much every account you open has at least a few gigabytes of storage included.

Upgrading to hundreds (or thousands) more gigs usually costs less each month than a couple of takeout pizzas. And if you’d rather store or back up your files at home, you can find good-quality external hard drives pretty much anywhere.

So with such an abundance of digital storage options, why on earth would anyone consider preserving their important documents on paper? After all, paper might last for centuries under perfect conditions but it’s also fragile. Heat, humidity, insects, and a dozen other things can damage or destroy it. 

Even stories and images etched in stone will eventually deteriorate thanks to erosion or pollution—though a 30,000-year lifespan is impressive.  

Which makes digital storage the perfect solution, right? Nope, because no physical media, not even digital, lasts forever. In fact, depending on how you store and use them, your careful digital backups could be more fragile than paper.

It’s known as digital decay, and it means that over time your digital backup media will degrade. Your CDs and DVDs will oxidize. Your solid-state drives (SSDs) will start to lose bits (most estimates put their lifespan at five or 10 years). There are plenty of other examples, but digital decay is a given. 

The cloud, then, must be the answer. Especially since large data centres expect their SSDs to eventually fail, so they use a combination of storage media along with alerts if a drive needs to be replaced.

But what about compatibility? After all, you can’t open a VHS tape on your smartphone. They just aren’t compatible. The same thing goes for every other format you save your files in. You need the right piece of hardware or software to open them.

File formats like .pdf or .docx are the standard right now, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be common in ten or twenty years. Something newer and better could come along and, over time, new software versions won’t be able to open them. You might as well need a Captain Midnight decoder ring.

Yes, you can convert your files and photos to newer standards, sticking to a diligent upgrade cycle. But how many of us stay on top of regular oil changes for our car, never mind converting our file backups? Realistically, it’s not going to happen.

Wills, insurance policies, property deeds. They’re all things we increasingly store as digital files and happily forget about for years until we need them—usually under stress and in a hurry. 

So for any document that’s vitally important, that you’d need to lay your hands on without worrying about file corruption or compatibility, make sure you’ve got at least one hard copy.

Digital backups? Absolutely. 

But keep those vital documents on paper, too. It’s a winning strategy—hands down. 

Photo by Ashkan Shahrokh on Unsplash