The internet is forever was once a cautionary cliché. The prevailing assumption was that everything uploaded online would be permanently and instantly accessible. We were told to not post impulsively, lest future lovers or employers unearth something embarrassing, and at the same time, we were encouraged to trust websites, software companies and digital devices with our most valuable memories, private messages and intimate data. 

Now, several decades into Web 2.0, it turns out that the internet might have a shelf life after all—something AI founders would do well to remember. Take MySpace, one of the most widely used websites of the early 2000s. Home to countless online flirtations and burgeoning friendships, it also hosted fanpages that helped unknown musicians—Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys and Adele, for example—become famous. But in 2019, the company confessed that everything uploaded before 2016—including 50 million songs—had been accidentally deleted. Another social media app, Vine, suffered a similar fate after it was purchased by Twitter and then discontinued. For several years, the company maintained an online archive but eventually, in 2019, it too disappeared off the internet. Those who didn’t download their videos were bereft.

So what’s the solution? When the popular web hosting service GeoCities was shut down in 2009, a volunteer archiving collective raced to download as many webpages as possible. In the last two years, similar volunteer projects have sought to preserve environmental and public health data that is no longer available on US governmental websites. But the valiant efforts of those preserving our digital past are often hampered by technology itself, with outdated file formats, degrading computer hardware and obsolete storage mediums like VHS tapes and floppy disks threatening to render much of the recent past unreadable. 

For now, at least, it is possible to take matters into your own hands. As convenient as cloud storage and streaming services are, it is always advisable to back things up where possible—occasionally downloading your files, email and social media archives to a hard drive (or two) to ensure you will continue to be able to access them. And doing a little judicious curating—by printing out the best photos from your camera roll, for instance—can help make sense of the ever-increasing amount of content we produce. Long term, however, it’s impossible to know if our .jpegs and .pdfs will be still readable in the decades and centuries to come. As a different cliché goes: Nothing lasts forever.