[elseweather]

I mean, you can also just let the data go. "nothing, chaos" is pretty simple. I don't believe being able to search my chatlogs from 2005 would make my life simpler, or better.

Some people are natural archivists and love that second-brain stuff though, and this is a pretty sweet example :). One area I strongly relate to Karlicoss is how bad it is getting data out of my bank; as a regular non-institutional customer I don't get API access, so I have to download a PDF manually every month and run it through some script to parse out the line items.

[sokoloff]

I have friends who have died and for whom I’ve lost our chat logs (some back from the AIM days). I also carelessly lost my home dir from college with my thesis and thesis code/data in it. (Tar, gzip, ftp in ascii mode, don’t check for months.)

Is my life meaningfully worse for those losses? No, not really. Have there been several times when it would have been better (even just temporary happiness/comfort) if I had access to the data? Definitely yes.