Your favorite flash game disappears. You find an emulator, but don’t download it, and now you can never play Pokemon Yellow again. A rare book is digitized, and then lost; a song you enjoyed is stuck in your head, but you don’t remember how it ends, and you cannot find it for the life of you. Scientific studies and shows, maps and tours, raw data and refined points are all digital now. If you can’t bare to lose something digital, you’ve got to save it somehow.
Data is a tricky thing in today’s age. If you have a modern computer, the odds are that it’s set to automatically upload all of your files to a cloud somewhere. It keeps the user from losing their data when they lose their computer, yes, but it also loses the data if the user loses their account password or internet, so it’s a lateral move for most. Some uploading and syncing services like DropBox will systematically scan anything that isn’t encrypted for ToS violating material, and on the off chance they find something that does, they often just obliterate the account according to anecdotes from Reddit, and Justin Roiland.
You could see how, in today’s climate, this might be concerning. Many pages that were just data or recommendations have been wiped off of the government’s website – online archives have them for now, but to ensure that data doesn’t go missing, it’s best to download it somewhere that cannot be yoinked away at the drop of a hat. All of this is to say data does go missing from services you might assume were absolute, so someone, whether that be you or internet archives, must be prepared. You lose a password. You lose an election. You lose potentially irreplaceable digital files as a result.
Beyond malice, good art goes missing a ton under this system of centralized storage too. The problem of lost media is that it’s often lost because the copyright holder just didn’t bother to archive it somewhere safe when they pulled the rights of other people to show it, letting it disintegrate into the void like dust in the wind. This happened to a lot of ‘bad’ movies on film – they were consigned to a storehouse somewhere, one that maybe lost climate control, and then the film disintegrated. In effect, that movie is gone, only held in the memories of the people who saw it when they saw it.
Somehow, this continues to happen even though the internet is supposed to be forever, by largely the same mechanisms. Oh, that anime looks cool? Too bad, nobody is selling the discs for it anymore and none of the streaming services have it because the studio doesn’t like it on its portfolio, or the studio went bankrupt during the 2000’s financial crises. For instance, you won’t find the very first animated adaptation of Phantom Blood because it’s gone. It’s unpirateable because it’s gone. There are no discs. There were no discs. There is just silence. If you must access it legally, you can’t. Worse, the pirates often don’t have niche things either, whether because copyright strikes get them on third party websites or because they never uploaded it in the first place. Piracy is a crime, don’t do piracy, but the definition of piracy gets a little fast and loose when a company has effectively given up on managing or providing access to an IP that it simultaneously won’t let go of the rights to, just in case they’re able to, twenty years from now, whip out some wildly profitable idea. But for those twenty years, fans of that IP will listen to deafening silence as the originals are slowly phased off of every platform but the company won’t make new stuff with it either.
You cannot count on things being somewhere out there anymore. Buy the disc of that series you like, if you can. Buy the real, physical game. Buy the MP3, just in case Spotify or the original artist pulls it some day. Heck, save the things you’re not sure have value. We only know what little we know about the past because of the things people decided to save. Grocery store stickers from campaigns that ended in the 70s show off what age ranges companies were appealing to. Fancy perfume containers discontinued in the 1920s, shaped like mice and rabbits, give us hints as to what the fashions of the time were. Further back, paintings depict fruits and vegetables differently than what we know them to look like today. What did field workers look like in the Middle Ages? The Ancient Romans were fighting graffiti artists! Ea Nasir of Mesopotamia for some reason saved clay tablets with complaints written to or about him, and now we know he was a merchant, and we can connect him with other businesses of the era because they saved their receipts! Receipts! One of the most touched and yet most fleeting things you’ll deal with in your day to day gave us a glimpse into the past!
Save your data. Save your physical media. It matters.
