Reliable copies: destroying the paper original without risk

Short answer: no, scanning a document does not automatically entitle you to destroy the paper original. Since the reform of French evidence law, Article 1379 of the Civil Code provides that a "reliable" copy has the same evidential weight as the original — but only if it faithfully reproduces the document and if its integrity is guaranteed over time. Decree no. 2016-1673 of 5 December 2016 sets out these technical conditions; the NF Z42-026 standard describes the process of faithful, durable digitisation, and NF Z42-013 covers electronic archiving with evidential value. In practice: if your scanning workflow produces no hash, no timestamp and no event log, keep the paper. And if the document is a notarial deed, a handwritten guarantee or a bearer instrument, keep the paper regardless.

The costly misunderstanding: "it's scanned, we can bin it"

That is the sentence you hear in every administrative department launching a digitisation project. A production scanner is hired, three hundred boxes are swallowed up, everything is dumped onto a server, and the shredder is called in.

Six months later, a dispute lands on the desk. A customer denies having signed a purchase order. Out comes the PDF. Opposing counsel asks a single question: "How do you prove that this file has not been altered since it was created?" And at that point, if the answer is "it's on our server, in the client folder", it's over. The judge will not necessarily disregard the exhibit — freedom of evidence remains the rule between traders — but it will be treated as mere prima facie evidence, to be corroborated by something else. Something else that you have just destroyed.

That is the heart of the problem. Paper has a quality that digital files do not natively possess: it is hard to alter without leaving a trace. A PDF, by contrast, can be rewritten in ten seconds. The entire legal architecture of the reliable copy consists of artificially restoring to the file a property that paper enjoyed for free.

What French law actually says

Three texts speak to one another, and they must be read together.

Article 1379 of the Civil Code states that a reliable copy has the same evidential weight as the original, and that reliability is left to the judge's assessment. But it adds a presumption: a copy made under conditions laid down by decree of the Conseil d'État is deemed reliable until proof to the contrary. In other words, if you comply with the decree, it is up to your opponent to show that your copy is doubtful. If you do not, it is up to you to show that it is reliable. In litigation, that reversal of the burden of proof changes everything.

Decree no. 2016-1673 of 5 December 2016 sets out those conditions. It requires the copy to be an identical reproduction of the form and content of the original, and its integrity to be attested by an electronic hash guaranteeing that any subsequent alteration is detectable. It refers explicitly to the qualified trust services of the European eIDAS regulation: qualified timestamping, qualified electronic seal, or storage in a system meeting the requirements of evidential archiving.

Article 1366 of the Civil Code, finally, recalls that an electronic writing has the same value as a paper writing provided that its author can be duly identified and that the document is created and stored in conditions apt to guarantee its integrity.

Remember the triad: fidelity (the image is complete and legible), integrity (it has not been altered), durability (it will still be legible and verifiable in ten or thirty years). A workflow that ticks only the first box does not produce a reliable copy; it produces an electronic photocopy.

The documents you never destroy

Before turning to the technical side, let us dispose of the cases where the question simply does not arise. Certain documents must be kept in paper original, whatever the quality of your scanning:

• Authentic instruments on paper (notarial deeds, bailiff's documents delivered in original form), except where they were created natively in electronic form by the authorised professional.
• Private deeds containing a mandatory handwritten statement: guarantees, handwritten acknowledgements of debt, certain waivers. The handwritten statement goes to the validity of the instrument, not merely to its proof.
• Enforceable instruments, negotiable instruments, bills of exchange, promissory notes: these are bearer instruments; the original is the right.
• Holographic wills, obviously.
• Documents whose original a third party may demand: certain life insurance contracts, guarantees, title deeds.
• Ballot papers, statutory registers that are initialled and page-numbered, and the police registers of certain regulated professions.

Outside these families, the vast majority of business records — invoices, delivery notes, ordinary commercial contracts, correspondence, minutes, fax transmission reports — can perfectly well live in digital form, provided the workflow holds up.

The scanning workflow: seven control points

The NF Z42-026 standard, published by AFNOR, defines the arrangements for the "faithful digitisation" of a paper document. It is not compulsory, but it is the benchmark court-appointed experts use to assess a workflow. Here is what it requires in substance, translated into operational language.

1. Prepare the document

Remove staples and paper clips, unfold, flatten out. A poorly prepared document produces a truncated image, and a truncated image is not a faithful copy — it is even legally dangerous, since it may make a clause disappear. An office paper trimmer and a staple remover prevent most feeding incidents.

2. Scan in colour, at sufficient resolution

The safe rule: 300 dpi minimum, in colour, including for documents that look black and white. Colour makes it possible to distinguish a signature in blue ink from a photocopy, a wet stamp from a printed one, a handwritten annotation from printed text. That is exactly what gets argued about in litigation. A duplex scanner with an automatic document feeder capable of holding that resolution without lossy compression is the basic tool: sheet-fed models of the ScanSnap type or equivalent handle a few dozen pages per minute and detect double feeds by ultrasound, which prevents missing pages.

3. Never crop, deskew or "clean up" aggressively

Background removal, automatic contrast or despeckle filters can erase a light pencil annotation. Fidelity trumps aesthetics.

4. Choose a durable format

The reference format for preservation is PDF/A (ISO 19005), which embeds its fonts and prohibits dynamic content. Uncompressed TIFF, or TIFF with lossless compression, remains acceptable for images. Avoid heavily compressed JPEGs and, above all, avoid storing only the OCR output: the text layer is a search convenience, not evidence.

5. Compute and seal a hash

This is the point that 90% of projects get wrong. Each file must be assigned a cryptographic hash (SHA-256), itself protected by an electronic seal or a qualified timestamp issued by a trust service provider. In France, ANSSI publishes the list of qualified providers, and the European trusted list records eIDAS services. Without that sealing, you cannot demonstrate either the date or the integrity.

6. Keep a log

The standard requires an event log: who scanned, when, with what equipment, what settings, what quality checks, what rescans. The log itself must be integrity-protected. It is that document, more than the PDF, that convinces an expert.

7. Deposit into an electronic archiving system

NF Z42-013 (taken up internationally as ISO 14641) sets out the requirements for an electronic archiving system: access control, traceability, classification scheme, retention periods, disposal procedure, format migration. A shared folder on a NAS is not an archiving system. A RAID backup NAS is useful as a storage layer, but it produces neither an evidential log nor any sealing.

The special case of invoices and the tax authorities

This is the area where the rules are most precise, because the tax authorities settled the question before the civil courts did.

Article A. 102 B-2 of the French Tax Procedure Code (Livre des procédures fiscales), introduced by the order of 22 March 2017, permits paper invoices received to be kept in digital form, provided that the scanning is carried out "identically", with no retouching facility, and that the file is accompanied by:

• either a server seal based on a certificate compliant with the French general security framework,
• or a digital hash,
• or an electronic signature,
• or any equivalent mechanism guaranteeing the authenticity of the origin, the integrity of the content and legibility.

Each file must also be timestamped, at least monthly, using an internal time source. If those conditions are met, the paper original may be destroyed and the copy can be relied on in the event of an audit.

Worth noting for 2026: the roll-out of mandatory electronic invoicing between VAT-registered businesses in France, driven by the so-called "e-invoicing" reform, changes matters at source. The timetable provides for mandatory receipt for all businesses, then issuance in waves according to company size. Natively electronic invoices, transiting through an approved platform, never have a paper version — the reliable copy problem disappears for them. It will persist for a long time for the historical backlog and for non-invoice documents.

And where do faxes fit in?

A fax received on a traditional machine is a paper document like any other: it falls squarely under the rules above. A fax received via a virtual number already arrives as a PDF — so there is no scanning stage, but the integrity of the file since receipt still has to be demonstrated. Many users wrongly believe that going through an online service is enough to confer evidential value. What counts is the presence of sealing and a log, exactly as for a scan.

The transmission report deserves separate treatment: it is often the only item evidencing the technical link between two numbers on a given date. It must be kept together with the document sent, in the same sealed batch, otherwise the link between proof of sending and proof of content is lost. We set out this logic in our guide to archiving faxes and evidential value over ten years.

For organisations still keeping a physical fax machine, a desktop UPS remains a useful precaution: a power cut in the middle of reception produces a truncated document, and therefore one that is useless as evidence.

Three mistakes that undo all the work

Scanning in black and white to save space. Storage costs less than litigation. A 4 TB external hard drive sells for the price of an hour of a lawyer's time.

Electronically signing the PDF with an employee's certificate. The certificate expires, the employee leaves, and signature verification throws up a warning three years later. For preservation purposes, an electronic seal belonging to the legal entity is more robust than an individual's signature.

Forgetting the destruction policy. Destroying paper is not an event, it is a documented process: which batches, after which quality check, approved by whom, with what destruction certificate. A cross-cut shredder meeting level P-4 of the DIN 66399 standard is the minimum for personal data, and the destruction provider must issue a certificate. Without a formal record, you cannot explain to a judge why you are not producing the original.

Frequently asked questions

Can a photo taken on a smartphone constitute a reliable copy?

Technically, nothing prohibits it: the decree prescribes no particular equipment. In practice, it is very fragile. Perspective distortion, shadows, aggressive JPEG compression and the absence of a log make fidelity hard to demonstrate. A photo can serve as a stopgap for internal use; it does not replace a controlled scanning workflow.

How long should paper be kept after scanning?

There is no legal "dual retention" period. Prudent practice is to keep the paper for three to six months, long enough to validate the workflow and carry out sample quality checks, then to destroy it batch by batch with a formal record. For high-stakes documents, many organisations keep the paper until the limitation period expires.

Is an electronically signed PDF enough on its own?

No, not over time. An electronic signature is verified at a given moment; after a few years, the certificate has expired and the chain of trust can no longer be verified. You need either a long-term signature format (PAdES-LTA, with successive timestamps) or deposit into an archiving system that handles the renewal of seals.

Can I destroy the original of a hand-signed contract?

Yes for an ordinary private contract, if the copy is reliable. No if the contract contains a handwritten statement required on pain of nullity — a guarantee is the textbook case. If in doubt about a significant financial commitment, keep the paper: the cost of retention is trivial compared with the risk.

What happens if the other side challenges my copy?

Article 1379 provides that if the copy is not reliable within the meaning of the decree, the judge assesses it freely. He may order production of the original; if it has been destroyed and you cannot point to a serious workflow, the copy loses much of its weight. Conversely, a copy presumed reliable can only be set aside if the other side adduces proof to the contrary — which, in practice, almost never happens.

In summary

• Scanning ≠ being allowed to destroy. Destroying the original is lawful only if the copy is "reliable" within the meaning of Article 1379 of the Civil Code and the decree of 5 December 2016.
• Three cumulative requirements: fidelity of the reproduction, integrity guaranteed by a hash, durability of legibility and verifiability.
• 300 dpi, colour, PDF/A, no retouching: that is the technical baseline described by the NF Z42-026 standard.
• Sealing is the critical point: SHA-256 hash + qualified eIDAS timestamp or electronic seal. Without it, you have an image, not evidence.
• A network folder is not evidential archiving: you need an archiving system compliant with NF Z42-013, with a log, traceability and a retention policy.
• Some documents are never destroyed: authentic instruments, mandatory handwritten statements, bearer instruments, wills.
• Paper invoices fall under Article A. 102 B-2 of the Tax Procedure Code, which is more precise and more permissive — provided you timestamp at least monthly.
• Document the destruction: quality check, batches, formal record, provider's certificate.

To go further into everyday uses and practical questions, see our FAQ and the list of available countries for sending documents.