Which Original Documents Should You Keep After Scanning?

Going paperless stalls at one question: is it safe to throw this away? People either keep everything, which defeats the purpose, or discard indiscriminately and eventually need a document nobody can reproduce. The useful distinction is not how important a paper feels, but whether its value lies in the information printed on it or in the physical object itself. A document that is merely a record can be scanned. A document that functions as an artifact, carrying seals, security features, or an issuing authority's signature, cannot.

Keep the originals of anything an institution will demand in physical form. Birth, marriage, and death certificates, passports, national identity cards, and residence permits belong here. So do academic diplomas and professional licences, notarised documents, apostilles, property deeds and titles, vehicle ownership papers, wills and testamentary instruments, court orders, immigration approvals, and original signed contracts for major transactions. Many of these carry embossing, watermarks, or seals that a scan cannot reproduce, and several are difficult, slow, or expensive to replace.

Almost everything else can be scanned and released. Utility bills, bank and card statements, delivery notes, product manuals, warranty cards, everyday receipts, insurance policy booklets, medical appointment letters, and routine correspondence exist to record information that a scan preserves perfectly. Tax-related documents sit in the middle: retention rules vary by country, commonly several years, and scans are widely accepted, but check your local requirement before shredding anything connected to a return you might need to defend.

A hybrid approach handles the practical reality. Scan everything, including the papers you keep, so you always have an accessible copy when the original is in a safe deposit box or filed at home. Then maintain what might be called the thin folder: a single physical file containing only genuine originals, small enough to grab in an emergency and reviewed once a year. Everything else gets scanned, filed digitally with a clear naming convention such as year, issuer, and document type, and the paper is shredded rather than stored.

Digital copies need care too. Scan at 300 DPI in colour so stamps and signatures survive, run OCR so the archive becomes searchable rather than a folder of unreadable images, and keep at least two backups in different places. Then treat the file as an archive object: compress to keep storage reasonable while text stays selectable, merge related pages into one document, remove blank pages, crop scanner borders, and protect anything sensitive with AES-256. PdfWill does all of this in your browser, so private records are processed locally and never uploaded.