Your example of personal family photos is in no way comparable to storing terabytes of essentially unindexed data for which one has no detailed knowledge about, under the notion that the government is somehow lighting a match to everything, and they're going to save it.

The government doesn't delete anything. It might be moved or inaccessible to the public but that data is somewhere in perpetuity.

It's one of the most deranged larps I've ever seen, then they pat each other on the back on BlueSky, desperately wanting to be a part of something.

These people envision themselves as folk heroes when what they really need to do is go outside and touch grass.

Typo that I can't correct anymore: that would be "won't want to deal".

We don't know now what to curate for the future. We should preserve as much of everything we can - we don't know what will be important in 50, or 500 years.

Case in point: retrocomputing is my hobby. I buy, restore, preserve, and use old computers. Most of them are home computers, because business computers go directly from the office to the recycling facility or the landfill. Unless someone deliberately preserved, say, a Burroughs B-25 desktop, or the similar from Data General, they are gone.

I was, believe it if you wish, thinking about old TV guides just this morning and wondering how one would even go about archiving those. Most of the stumbling blocks for taking apart the glued binding for scanning have been figured out, of course, but for any given week there may have been as many as 60 or 70 editions (for each television market, I think). None of these have proper ISSN numbers as far as I'm aware, and other than the listings they can be visually indistinguishable. Then there is the challenge of finding those, and not knowing whether this or that edition is missing (from time to time, the company would create new additions for new regions, or fold old ones back into some other are) along with even parsing the content. Many of these tv shows aren't on themoviedb or thetvdb, and if the shows are, then there won't be episode listings (there were 6000 Donahue talk show episodes, after all). On top of all of that, you can't necessarily know what was on tv at a given time and day, with federal government preemptions, commercials, unreported last-minute rescheduling, etc.

But I can also see why people might want to keep more interesting data, like when the Federal Cheese-Sniffing Agency moved offices back in 1982 and they have meticulous records of the 483 filing cabinets that had to be moved from the original location to their new home in Furrytown, Pennsylvania.

I wonder if those would be useful in identifying the potential contents of specific Marion Stokes tapes (my understanding is that they're sorted, but are only labeled with channel and date/time and are being archived slowly): https://libwww.freelibrary.org/blog/post/5393

That's a great idea.

There's are sites that stream old content with a old tube tv UI wrapped around the video frame but they don't have all the commercials and they don't follow the old schedules like you suggest.

I've got a friend who has hoarded digitized copies of VHS recordings of old cartoons from that era complete with the commercials, so the content is definitely out there.