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Comment by molbioguy | Hacker News Reader

My grandparents and parents either experienced or personally knew people who lost everything at some point, through war, social strife, or economics, and personal tragedies. Same on my spouse's side. Physical photos and letters were among the few things that often survived, possibly because they are only of value to the original 'owner'. I think that close brush with the impermanence of belongings fueled the habits of preparing for loss by archiving and preserving physical mementos. People trust that digital artifacts will survive through redundancy, but we're so early in the process of testing that belief. And society has been rather stable in comparison to my grandparents' generation ...

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My parents house burned down. They had 20 minutes to grab what they could before wildfire came.

My dad dumped out a box of full of gold to put the pet rabbit in the box.

Later on the wtf hit. Why did I not just put the rabbit on top of the gold.

Pepper the rabbit lived a long and happy life though.

Wouldn't gold survive the fire? Melting point is near 2000 degrees F

Ingots and sovereigns, perhaps. But jewellery would've taken some damage.

They were able to salvage some gold from fire. I think they got about 1,000 dollars of raw metal out of 100,000 worth of Coins

Like all things: things survive as long as there are people with a will to maintain them. Will my hypothetical kids want my 10 TB archive of projects, photos, and videos enough to keep them stored and learn the tools needed to access them? Who knows. We can say archving has never been easier though.

I really doubt there's a future where archivists lose the ability to open a pdf, doc, jpg, or png, even if those are not standard formats supported by OSes in the future. The data will likely be there and accessible, but it's unknown if the interest will be there. Attention is already stretched to an atom-thick sheet. If that trend continues I can't imagine people caring about things that happened last week, let alone last century (most of the time).

My grandmother, who was a child in ww2 and experienced extreme resource scarcity after the war, would keep a lot of potted/preserved food in the cellar. After she passed, we didn't really see that as useful and dumped it all (it didn't appear particularly edible to us - maybe if you're starving.)

What I mean by that is, people probably only keep what is useful to them. And if your collection is seen as useful to some people in a couple decades isn't really easy to tell. Depends on the circumstances I'd say.

> And if your collection is seen as useful to some people in a couple decades isn't really easy to tell. Depends on the circumstances I'd say.

Though I think you can get a good idea by asking yourself questions like "what things of my grandfather's am I interested in?" and "what kinds of things of their grandfathers are people often interested in?"

Also, someone's always interested in genealogy. So I bet a short bio with a good photo, spread around in a few physical copies, will probably be preserved for quite some time.

You're right, and you're an optimist! But people lose things not just from a loss of will to maintain them, but rather also from events outside their control. The means to read digital media survive, but could events lead to the loss/corruption of the digital media itself. And the effort to maintain digital archives is sometimes large, especially when tech changes rapidly. Convenience trumps almost everything else! And I'm not talking about my kids. At some point, I'll be too old to deal with the digital archives on my own, but a box of pictures will be within reach.

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