My previous job consisted of a lot of disaster contingency planning. Every three months I'd write a document that would be needed in the event of the deaths of me and a significant number of my work colleagues, only for it to be destroyed three months later and replaced with another one.

None of those documents were ever opened while I was at that company, (or else this is an incredibly spooky comment), but none of them were wasteful either. The knowledge that they wouldn't be needed was only available in retrospect, and the potential cost of losing the core technical staff was enormous.