With modern technology allowing for data to be sorted, stored, and searched with comparable ease, challenges that still require actual physical paperwork seem daunting. How did the researchers, businesses, and governments of the past handle the vast amount of written reports generated by daily life? Are there any methods for gathering, sorting, and analyzing physical records that were effective historically, but that modern institutions have lost the will or technical expertise to do?
This is a super wide ranging question and I'm not in a position to answer all of it. I'll just touch on a couple of brief points from what I do know.
The Kanesh tablets
The ancient Assyrian site of Kanesh is notable for giving us some really old (couple of millenia BC) examples of how ordinary people stored their data. These were 1) written on clay tablets 2) kept in separate archive rooms 3) organized into distinct containers (baskets, chests, etc) often based on date.
Something notable here is that data takes up lots of space. Forget about getting a library on a USB; a single clay tablet is about the size of a book, which explains how a single family of prolific Kunesh letter-writers could easily fill up an entire room with records.
We also see some examples of early envelopes. Basically, you take a clay tablet and wrap it in another layer of clay. Now the outer shell needs to be broken to see whats inside, and you get a tamper proof seal. Sometimes, if I remember correctly, the message would actually be written on the inside of the 'envelope' clay.
Persian Proclamations
A tried and true method of information dissemination in the ancient world was to have your scribes write down the same thing on many different tablets, then send a tablet out to sit in the main square of population centers. The first example I can think of is the Cyrus Cylinder, where Cyrus the Great wrote down his state model and sent out copies to everyone. His son Darius I followed in his footsteps; we've got a copy of his proclamation from the Behistun Inscription where he lists all his great deeds and then says "Afterwards this inscription I sent off everywhere among the provinces." This general idea carried on in time, evolving into town criers and then newsboys.
This tells us that there was some expectation of literacy throughout the country; probably not everyone, but at least a person per town. In some cases, it was a lot higher than you'd expect.
It also introduces us to an important part of ancient data management: scribes. Royal palaces etc would have legions of scribes to do all the writing and data-organizing, who were trained for years for the job. Ancient data management required a lot of highly skilled humans.