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It's not like paper in boxes don't have their own maintenance costs.

But different and arguably on-average cheaper costs.

Paper can rot if it's not kept climate-controlled, but not nearly as fast as bits stored to non-volatile media if the power goes out and there isn't a hot backup.

You can keep a whole warehouse worth of paper files on one drive though. 1TB is like 500M pages of text (1000 pallets).

Government records aren't "text" though. They're documents, which need to be preserved with any margin notes, markings, signatures, etc. intact. So if you're storing government records, you're storing images.

Physical storage space definitely does have a cost, but so does software licensing, hardware maintenance contracts, etc. And a lot of government organizations have physical space in abundance, but IT resources, less so.

Don’t know why this is downvoted. When a bank stores a record of a cheque it’s a scanned image for that very reason.

Oh, for sure, imagine trying to warehouse [images of] every submitted form in a condition that can be read - so, climate controlled at least.

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