The New York Times nearly learned a painful lesson about the dangers of maintaining paper-only records when a pipe burst in the sub-basement housing its photo archives.

Were it not for fortuitous timing and the quick work of a news assistant who spotted the leak, the entire photo catalog—which dates back decades and had never been digitized—could easily have been lost.

That averted disaster is a dramatic example of the importance of backup and digitization, but you don’t need to be sitting on a basement full of irreplaceable Pulitzer-winning photojournalism for it to matter. Most businesses still have vital records stored in a paper-only format. Even if you’ve moved to fully digital processes for all of your important documents, it’s likely that your records from before the system was implemented are sitting in a file cabinet or storage somewhere.

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SOURCE Ricoh USA, Inc.