The Internet Is Both the Best and Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Historical Preservation

 When the internet first became widely available in the 1990s a lot of people thought it would solve the problem of historical preservation forever.

Everything would be digital. Digital things could be copied perfectly and endlessly. Nothing would ever need to be lost again.

That turned out to be wrong in a complicated and important way.

What the Internet Got Right

The internet did make it possible to preserve and share historical information at a scale that was never possible before. Archives that used to be accessible only to people who could physically travel to them are now searchable online. Documents that existed in one copy in one library can now be read by anyone in the world. Photographs that would have decayed in someone's attic can be scanned and preserved digitally.

The Internet Archive at archive.org has been crawling and saving copies of websites since 1996. Their Wayback Machine contains over 800 billion saved web pages. Genealogical databases contain records that would have taken months to access through physical archives are now searchable in minutes. Oral history projects have been able to share recordings with audiences that physical archives could never reach.

These are real and significant achievements. The internet has genuinely made historical preservation more possible for more people than ever before.

What the Internet Got Wrong

Digital files require infrastructure to survive. They need servers. They need electricity. They need organizations willing to maintain them. They need file formats that stay readable as technology changes. And all of those things cost money and require ongoing effort.

When a website shuts down its content can disappear overnight. When a company goes out of business the digital content it hosted can vanish. When a social media platform changes its policies old content gets deleted. When someone stops paying for hosting years of content can disappear in an instant.

This has already happened repeatedly. GeoCities, which hosted millions of personal web pages throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, shut down in 2009. Most of those pages were lost. Myspace lost years of music uploads due to a server migration error. Platforms have deleted millions of photographs and posts when terms of service changed. The early internet is already partially gone.

The assumption that digital means permanent is wrong. Digital means potentially permanent if someone is actively maintaining and preserving the file. Without that active effort digital content is actually more fragile than paper in some ways.

What to Do About It

Do not rely on a single platform to preserve anything important to you. If it matters, save it in multiple places.

Use services designed specifically for long term preservation. Archive.org is specifically built to preserve content permanently. Libraries and archives are specifically built to preserve content permanently. Consumer platforms like Instagram and TikTok are not.

Save copies locally as well as in the cloud. An external hard drive that you control is not dependent on a company staying in business or a server staying online.

Support organizations that are working on digital preservation. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that runs entirely on donations and is preserving more of human knowledge than almost any other institution on earth.

The internet is a remarkable tool for preservation. It is not a magic solution. It requires the same ongoing human effort that preservation has always required. Just with better tools.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.