Document Retention

[BrianG]

After the last flooding I got, I started thinking about ways to mitigate losses. I have a couple of those "fire-resistant" safes to hold important documents (taxes, receipts, pictures, etc). I also have been scanning those documents as PDFs and storing on external harddrives (two of them; one at work and one at home). I was wondering if these PDFs would be suitable as the only source of these documents (could reprint them if necessary) instead of keeping all this paper. It takes much less room to store them as 1's and 0's than the physical papers, but not sure if they can be legally used is lieu of the originals?