Are they? I mean, just recently there was a post on HN asking whether the G+ backups were necessary in the sense of creating a permanent record of everything pe

Are they? I mean, just recently there was a post on HN asking whether the G+ backups were necessary in the sense of creating a permanent record of everything people submit online. Make no mistake, certain content is worth archiving, but imagine if we'd been archiving everything since our species first days. Now we have the capability, we're obsessed that we must archive everything; how useful are the older IMDB comments really? I dread to think how much storage is 'wasted' in these archives storing useless content, and how useful it really is to people in reality. There are archives of every reddit comment ever made, but there are many hundreds of thousands of spam or useless comments.... I don't think the Internet needs an immutable record of every piece of content or every hyper link to preserved for the rest of time, we need to discern what's really important and throw away the rest, if not to make it easier to parse (but, since that's difficult, we just grab it all which whilst great presents its own issues in terms of required resources).