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.
during the twitter exodus my friend was fretting over not being able to access a beloved twitter account’s tweets and wanting to save them somehow. I told her if she printed them all on acid free paper she had a better chance of being able to access them in the future than trying to save them digitally
sad and true
Optical disks are also pretty good too. You can even buy special ceramic ones that shouldn’t degrade over centuries or millennia.
oh wow I have not heard of the ceramic ones but I do remember them having high hopes for the gold ones. now the problem is in the near future it might be harder to find machines that have cd drives