Today perhaps more than ever, data is ephemeral. Despite Stephen Hawking’s late-in-life revelation that information can never truly be destroyed, it can absolutely disappear from public access without leaving a trace.
It’s not just analogue data, either. Just as books go out of print, websites can drop offline, taking with them the wealth of knowledge, opinions, and facts they contain. (You won’t find the complete herb archives of old Deadspin on that site, for instance.) And in an era where updates to stories or songs or short-form videos happen with the ease of a click, edits happen and often leave no indication of what came before. There is an entire generation of adults who are unaware that a certain firefight in the Mos Eisley Cantina was a cold-blooded murder, for instance.
But between its initial broadcast in 1967 and 1978, the BBC routinely deleted its programming after it had been broadcast in the belief that there was no practical value to keeping copies. Nine years of beloved Doctor Who episodes are missing. Some clips survive and occasionally, a full episode will turn up, courtesy of a foreign network that found the original two-inch tape in a box down the side of the couch, but most of Doctor Who’s earliest broadcasts are gone for good. I remember the same happening with Springbok Radio in South Africa from the 1970’s.
Copyrights seek to restrict copying and duplicating many works yet those single sources can often be lost through buy-outs or shut-downs. But across the world there are many who preserve and hoard copies and whatever they think valuable.
See Digital hoarders: “Our terabytes are put to use for the betterment of mankind”
Nerds with hoarding tendencies? Preservationists of history? Many terabytes either way.