I’ve heard the early Internet age referred to as the future dark ages. When all the work, information and content is digitized, it’s prone to being lost to history forever.
Early Internet - yes, but then there’s the middle Internet (or the high Internet if you like, like high Middle Ages) which was in large part scraped by archive.org, and also people generally still knew about offline backups in both eras, and then there’s the late Internet, which moved to siloed services and at the same time most people using it were and are oblivious about preserving data elsewhere. That’s the worst one.
My partner works in historical archiving for science and medicine. Museum work, basically. He’s told me so much of the archives are donated collections of notes, letters, journals, and so on from important doctors, researchers, scientists, etc. Donated by the subject themselves in their later years or by their families.
He’s told me there is a growing issue with those people starting to donate entirely digital collections, but even worse than that, are all the documents that are not being stored on a physical hard drive, but on web services and clouds. By the time these people are willing to start donating their things, so much of it has just been deleted forever without them realizing it. Or worse, they die, and their families no longer have access.
Working in IT, I told him about Microsoft’s growing push to eliminate Outlook and PST files, make it all web based email, and he wasn’t surprised, but he was still bummed to hear it. Apparently a not insignificant amount of those donations are locally stored emails.
I’ve heard the early Internet age referred to as the future dark ages. When all the work, information and content is digitized, it’s prone to being lost to history forever.
Early Internet - yes, but then there’s the middle Internet (or the high Internet if you like, like high Middle Ages) which was in large part scraped by archive.org, and also people generally still knew about offline backups in both eras, and then there’s the late Internet, which moved to siloed services and at the same time most people using it were and are oblivious about preserving data elsewhere. That’s the worst one.
My partner works in historical archiving for science and medicine. Museum work, basically. He’s told me so much of the archives are donated collections of notes, letters, journals, and so on from important doctors, researchers, scientists, etc. Donated by the subject themselves in their later years or by their families.
He’s told me there is a growing issue with those people starting to donate entirely digital collections, but even worse than that, are all the documents that are not being stored on a physical hard drive, but on web services and clouds. By the time these people are willing to start donating their things, so much of it has just been deleted forever without them realizing it. Or worse, they die, and their families no longer have access.
Working in IT, I told him about Microsoft’s growing push to eliminate Outlook and PST files, make it all web based email, and he wasn’t surprised, but he was still bummed to hear it. Apparently a not insignificant amount of those donations are locally stored emails.