[phendrenad2]

Wait the library wasn't lost due to that fire, but the contents were slowly lost due to the passage of time and people not caring or having access to copy it's contents? That makes the analogy way better, but the "burning" part is sadly wrong.

[piroux]

Yes, that is exactly what I wanted to convey by "lack of efforts".

2000 years ago, as a civilization, even if we failed to care enough for the Works stored in the Library, their loss would not have happened if access was not limited, which would have helped in their dissemination and issuing of copies.

Today, as a civilization, if we fail to implement to right process to backup on time what matters to us, we will repeat the same errors as our ancestors.

I guess many historians today would prefer to see those non-existent backups of the Alexandria Library rather than those of Yahoo Groups, but who knows what is more important after all ;)

[ajsnigrutin]

The main difference is, that then, "backup" ment copying everything by hand, and now, it means one simple copy-paste. Considering the size and price of modern hard drives, and relatively small size of old archives, any one individual can backup a huge amount of data (and even offer/share it as a download link/torrent seed/etc).

Their whole Library would probably fit even on a smallest now-available sd card.