The director-general of the National Archives of Australia, David Fricker, says federal government agencies are now spending about $220 million a year storing their paper records.

''And that amount is only going to grow, as more information is created,'' Mr Fricker said. ''$220 million is not sustainable; it's wasteful.''

Mr Fricker and the Arts Minister, Simon Crean, who oversees the archives, toured the agency's Mitchell repository yesterday, where some of the government's most important historical documents are conserved.

Mr Crean warned public servants they had until 2015 to shift to a digital archiving system, as the government would not allow paper files to be produced after that.

He said the public service was creating a ''mind-boggling'' number of documents. ''In any one year, the Commonwealth agencies, all 200 of them, generate, I'm told, 850 million pieces of paper,'' he said.

Digital record-keeping techniques would save the public millions of dollars, and were easier to access and search.

The federal bureaucracy's five-year IT sustainability plan, published in 2010, set a target of cutting each public servant's office paper use from an average of 40 sheets per working day to 20 by 2015.