The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age(technologyreview.com)

10 pointsby Brajeshwarvor 2 Jahren9 comments

The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/19/1096284/data-archives-archeologists-tiktok-future-wayback-machine/

10 comments

Honestly, I am OK with an ephemeral Internet. I physically clean house yearly and aim to discard or donate anything I didn't need, use, or look at in the past year, and I really wouldn't mind if that happened to my digital "stuff" too. 99.99% of the code I develop, the pictures and video I take, the HN posts I write, nobody is going to look at after a week or so, including me. Pick a random year in the past, go to your phone's photos, and pick a random photo from that year. I bet this is the first time you've ever looked at it since you took the picture. I know it would be the case for me. There might be a handful of family photos and stuff I consider sentimental, but not even enough to fill a shoebox let alone a cloud storage provider.

Moreover, with the amount of intrusive data mining going on, it would be better for all of our privacy if our content just expired regularly.

m463vor 2 Jahren

I was going to argue against this, but then again, how much of our happiness is held back by our "stuff"... our possessions that possess us instead?

I remember reading some decluttering book and "I might need it" is the phrase that indicates something should go.

That said, a TB hard disk in a closet isn't too much of a burden and https://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

ryandrakevor 2 Jahren

You should know that jwz.org looks at the HTTP referrer and childishly serves an unexpected NSFW image to users coming to that site specifically from HN.

HeatrayEnjoyervor 2 Jahren

I'm sure they really care about your opinion /s

alinoe_vor 2 Jahren

I used to think similar too until my parents gave me an USB stick stuffed with random photos from my youth taken ~20 years ago that they downloaded from the family PC after I moved out.

I am 100% sure I won't look at those again for at least another couple of years, but there is so many fond memories there I have made a few copies and plan to 'maintain' those indefinitely.

neuralRiotvor 2 Jahren

When you’re young all the good times are ahead on your life path, when you start to get old they are behind more and more, it’s nice to look at something, a picture, a postcard, a letter and feel a little of the happiness it brought once.

AtlasBarfedvor 2 Jahren

Cloud storage is basically destroyed the market impetus for long-term durable digital storage.

The premise of the article basically is that, because you certainly cannot trust cloud companies to keep your data.

It used to be your only real guarantee of them keeping your data is the fact that exponentially growing storage solutions would make your previous data a pittance compared to newer storage solution capacity.

But I think that's going to come to an end, much like the inevitable end of die shrinks.

sneed_chuckervor 2 Jahren

I think the average person just can't keep up with it.

If you're technically inclined it's pretty easy and cheaper than ever to have your own durable local backups. But even so it's work.

jtothehvor 2 Jahren

I have emails going back > 20 years in IMAP folders. They've survived numerous email server migrations and personal email address changes. For a while I was running my own email server. I find Apple's iCloud has hung on to things for me for quite a long time too.

I used to use Linux on the desktop and periodically lost things that were saved to it. A lot of early photos are lost due to that.

I had a web page about my daughter starting when she was born in January 1998 and my employer, who I left, promised it would "always" be preserved. They deleted it about a year or two later and I wish I could somehow get it back.

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren