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Comment by weisser | Hacker News Reader

See also physical books, letters, LPs, etc.'

Until relatively recently it wasn't expected that everything would stand the test of time.

But people have been preserving physical books for hundreds, even thousands of years. Physical archives have been a thing for a long time and try to preserve everything from music to letters to government records. Historians often use letters and notes written by people hundreds of years ago, because people often saved that stuff.

Same with web content most of this content is likely still somewhere. While you and I have no access too it someone does, whether they'll share it with us is another thing all together.

That's not necessarily true. Some of it is preserved by the internet archive, but a lot falls through the cracks.

Maybe you mean it's still on someone's home computer. But hard drives fail over time. So do CDs, floppy disks, and flash drives. Over time all this stuff will be lost unless someone makes an effort to preserve it.

I'm referring mainly to the authors of these works likely having something lying on a hard drive sitting on a shelf or backed up on 'C: Back up 2012-06-21 4 of 7'. These are much like those piles of old letters found in Grandma's attic, mostly unintelligible (I certainly can't read the cursive scrawls) but still ultimately not 'lost' if someone is prepared to spend the time recovering them.

Oh Come on. You have never heard of the Library of Alexandria? The day this was gone, we lost one of the largest chunk of older books and parchments. We are talking about a huge collection that went up in flames.

The documents we still have now are just a tiny fraction of what existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...

That was over a thousand years ago. And it even proves my point that people in the past did try to preserve things.

Indeed. I, for one, am very grateful that most of my high school papers have since faded into the abyss ;-)

... or so I hope.

hs.archive.org/beta/

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