Alternatively ... they are forced to maintain it for compliance reasons, especially when it comes to healthcare, finance and other regulated industries (defense, in particular). This even applies to manufacturing companies assembly medical devices and defense products: all the data about the supply chain, the engineering designs & changes, the manufacturing and quality testing, and shipment needs to be kept for XX years and is subject to both audit by regulatory agencies and to legal discovery.
Those are all things which can be printed out and stored in alternative forms and possibly even recreated from other data. It's also the case that much of that data will never be permanently at rest and so several archive copies of the data exist.
Recordings of performances are an entirely different category of artefact.
