I'm wondering whether they could ship the film masters to the Internet Archive. They might even pursuede the Internet Archive to pay the shipping costs.
Kind of like setting up a new computer and don’t migrate the bulk of your stuff unless you really need it. Turns out you can dump 95% and never notice. I’m sure that rights holders will show up and passion communities will lobby for the stuff of great value. Overall the world will continue.
Amusingly, since the mid 90s, I’ve always just migrated everything into a folder called “old stuff” and each time it’s been about 10% of the new drive’s size.
I just untangled and flattened a 6-7 layer deep nested directory structure like that where each layer had another "old stuff" directory... It felt like archaeology.
This is ... exactly what I have in my downloads folder. If I find something through search in Downloads/old/old/older/old/old I know I should move it.
On Windows, I like using TreeSize for this.
And reading it is like going back in time. I came across an email archive from 20 years ago. Going through it had me wondering what the hell I was thinking back then...