[KronisLV]

> Welcome to the world of digital archiving. It's an enormously complicated space, and even for just my own personal projects and content, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to ensure things are future proof and can be archived easily.

For web content, in my eyes it's a pretty cut and dry example - if the authors of any piece of content don't want it to be archived and aren't forthcoming in making this archival a viable pursuit, then the content simply should not be archived. Alternatively, just get a static PDF of it for future reference instead of fighting an uphill battle against webpages and even software that's user hostile.

For your own content, however, i think that you're on the right track. Use simple file formats, have tested backups and ideally rely on stable, boring software that's also slow to evolve and change.

[johannes1234321]

If we had only things from ancient history which people wanted to be archived we'd have a very different view on history. True future historians will have a lot more material about our present, but that still shouldn't limit our intent for archival of as much as we can. Only future will know what is relevant

[KronisLV]

> True future historians will have a lot more material about our present, but that still shouldn't limit our intent for archival of as much as we can.

In my eyes, unless you have a personal interest in the material that you want to archived that would make you overlook most complications, the burden of preserving or even making their information easy to preserve should lie on its authors.

For example, if you as a person want to make your voice be heard through centuries, then it should be upon you to use open data formats or even something as simple as Markdown, as opposed to binary .docx files or similar formats that will have significant problems related to reading them.

Furthermore, there is no actual guarantee of anyone actually caring about what you (or, let's say, i) might say, for example, in an offhanded remark on Twitter about seeing some cute kittens today, apart from any such data being included in a larger analysis of bulk data.

I'm certainly not against the idea of archiving or preserving data, but it seems that most larger events out there will have a huge amount of coverage either way.