This is something that keeps me worried at night. Unlike other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets, information on the Internet can just blink into nonexistence when the server hosting it goes offline. This makes it difficult for future anthropologists who want to study our history and document the different Internet epochs. For my part, I always try to send any news article I see to an archival site (like archive.ph) to help collectively preserve our present so it can still be seen by others in the future.

  • Gork@beehaw.orgOP
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    2 years ago

    Yeah and unless someone has the exact knowledge of what hard drive to look for in a server rack somewhere, tracing an individual site’s contents that went 404 is practically impossible.

    I wonder though if Cloud applications would be more robust than individual websites since they tend to be managed by larger organizations (AWS, Azure, etc).

    Maybe we need a Svalbard Seed Vault extension just to house gigantic redundant RAID arrays. 😄

    • RealAccountNameHere@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      This isn’t directly related to your comment, but you seem so smart, and I got to say that is definitely one thing I’m enjoying on this website over Reddit! :-)

      • Gork@beehaw.orgOP
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        2 years ago

        Thanks _ I don’t consider myself brilliant or anything but I appreciate your compliment! The thing I like the most is that everyone is so friendly around here, yourself included ☺️