I've had this debate with our local developers on our projects. 

I'm personally in favor of an obsolete or attic directory.  While it may be trivial to get things back out of a version control system, you need to know they are there in the first place. I cannot count the number of times I've found that a new job I'm working on is  modification or a replacement for something that use to exist and was removed long before my time on the project. A quick scan of the obsolete directory is often much faster than remembering VC system specific commands to find possible candidates or rely on enough details being recorded in the log to identify removed files of interest. For little space, the obsolete/attic directory can provide a really useful resource..