[jrochkind1]

The other side of this is for that the past centuries things that were on _paper_ (letters, photographs, newsletters, zines, personal notes/journals, whatever) could be just left sitting around, and _some_ portion of them would still be there and legible decades+ later for historical purposes.

When it's digital... if you don't keep feeding it, it's gone forever.

There has been some coverage of historians and archivists concerned about this, here's just the first random thing i found googling:

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/digital-era-end-history/st...

But yes, professional archivists increasingly recognize you can't save _everything_ digital, we couldn't afford it. Figuring out what to save is a challenge. But if we save nothing, we're not gonna have much history to look at.