A box containing original documents was standing in a researcher's living room. On a particularly cold day, his daughter's babysitter looked for material to light a fire. She mistook the papers for fire kindling since she assumed that the filled-in questionnaires could only be scratch paper.

This story shows that storing documents containing personal or sensitive data in locked furniture within locked rooms is crucial for data protection, but also to preserve the documents as such. While the damage from the document destruction would have been significantly reduced if there had been digital copies, this is not always possible for all documents. Thus, particular care must be taken with irretrievable materials.