[epc]

Stuff disappears from the web, from Google's index. Jurisdictions issue diktats that information be removed.

I used to rely on tags on bookmarks to find things, only to discover that the pages I’d bookmarked had disappeared (bit rot, corporate pivot, corporate failure, death of the blogger, etc).

I now save pages I find useful to Evernote. It's not ideal, but at least it's indexed by Evernote (and some images are OCRd so any text in the images also ends up in the search index). I download PDFs and other non-HTML resources. I assume Evernote will disappear some day so I back up my notebooks regularly.

I’ve been online in some format or another since 1987, the only certainty is that the thing I distinctly remember reading a couple of years ago will either disappear from Google’s index (Altavista, Veronica, Archie, etc) or will be removed (think of all of the blogs that used to live at typepad.com or vox.com or LiveJournals).

If it's valuable to you…save it.