it's fascinating how the general direction became to never delete data. All the attempts of taking a photo, all the downloads of bank-statements, all the useless emails.

At some point in the future the amount of data being stored indiscriminately must consume such a huge amount of resources and cost, that it becomes a hidden fixed cost within a country's GDP, without any tangible benefit...

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kccqzy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Historians actually would love this. Currently many historians try to reconstruct how life was like centuries ago from accidentally preserved artifacts. Future historians would have no trouble understanding how our daily life is like.

	▲	dguest 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Our daily life, sure, but they are going to need a lot of computing power to find the bits that we were most proud of. I hope they have it.

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anonu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

don't we inflate this problem away? storage should get more abundant and cheaper and the old media looks comparitevly small compared to higher fidelity and higher definition formats that come later. so it doesn't matter if your gmail stores 20 years of useless emails.

	▲	rickdeckard 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> don't we inflate this problem away? That continues to be the assumption, yes. Disregarding all the waste being created in the process. What's fascinating is the fact that the production of TAPE sees a 5x boost. That's the format with the slowest retrieval rate, only making sense for long-term storage, usually 1+ years. So is there really 5x more valuable data now, or is it just not economic to actually judge the need for preserving data...?