These are all features for companies - no liability of haunting, written word. I'm desperately trying to connect to "modern" chat services via things like Pidg

These are all features for companies - no liability of haunting, written word. I'm desperately trying to connect to "modern" chat services via things like Pidgin to have logs - while on some level, remembering everything exactly the way it was is unnatural, links and knowledge is important to be possible to be kept. I think people are starting to realize that actually having a copy is important. Hosting things for yourself, taking care of backups, etc, are painful, hard problems, but they worth it in the long run. One more thing: many digital media is significantly more ephemeral, than a lot of us realizes. Out of countless CD from the past 20 years, I can only still read a few of them (the ones written with a 1x Plextor SCSI drive are all still fine). If you truly value an photo, make a proper print, archival grade tint, archival grade paper.