Technology is a major part of the lives of many of us. Yet is it long lived? We might be wise to persist some of what we need to keep outside of the technology, perhaps even on paper. Can we still read a floppy disk? I recently found important potentially valuable data from years ago and a lot was on DVD disks, some on older versions, maybe CD disks and some of it was on floppy disks. Emails, in old archive formats. Luckily I was able to buy low cost disk readers but the email archives took a bit of thinking. I transferred it all eventually to modern media and formats. How long can this continue? We might not be able to read social media posts and other Cloud data at all in five years if companies do not help us see it, or go under. I used to work with a tech specialist who was trying to ensure there were copies of Bible texts preserved in formats suitable to be kept for decades. Will there even be computers and Cloud in decades? It might all be made obsolete. AI might only talk to other AI and humans be out of the loop. We might want to make sure we keep paper Bibles and print out stuff we really need, now while we still have a say, before progress takes the initiative away from us.
