There's this mindset that everything on the internet will stay there forever.
However, more often than not, a lot of things disappear. Which is both a good and a bad thing. When you go searching for old webpages, a lot of designs do not work anymore and many hyperlinks are broken.
Social media disappear. When Myspace disappeared, when Hyves (a Dutch social media platform) closed, MSN Messenger stopped, so much data just went away. And this happens while people rely on some of the social media platforms as some form of memory keeping. With all your photos being uploaded to the cloud, there's no need for making photo albums anymore, while it takes a lot of work to organize and manage all your media to future-proof this.
Some random notes:
- Google Calendar deletes your data after 3 years. Your appointments are not being saved in a planner.
- It takes a lot of work to structure your files such that it will last forever.
- How to save your data? Should you use a physical back-up (hard-drive) or a digital cloud back-up? Or both? And what if these cloud platforms are located in another country? How safe are these? What about your privacy?
- The importance of health logging. More on this later.
References
- How To Archive Your Work Digitally by Cedar Pasori
- Newsletter On digital composting and letting go by Matthew Prebeg
- Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring by Josh Dzieza