Yeah, I think that people really tend to overlook how much of our common history and heritage exists exclusively as bits on some old hunk of rust, and how frequ

Yeah, I think that people really tend to overlook how much of our common history and heritage exists exclusively as bits on some old hunk of rust, and how frequently those bits are permanently and irrevocably vaporized. Shutdowns like this are well-planned and orderly compared to the much-more-common-than-anyone-wants-to-admit "woops, I ran rm -rf in the wrong directory", "woops, I ran fsck on a mounted disk" (which I literally did last night, fortunately without the deserved vaporization), or "woops, someone sold the wrong server and the hard drive is out in the wild now", followed up by the inevitable "woops, turns out the backups have been broken for the last 32 months, probably should've been checking that". Historians are going to have a hard time moving forward. Until the last 15 years or so, when someone died, you could go collect "their papers" -- journals, letters, records, photos, and so on. The digital equivalent is scattered across dozens of personal devices and thousands of servers. Even if we're generous and assume that something like 20% of it will still exist when a person becomes deceased, the data is comingled in someone's crappy MySQL somewhere, or it's stored behind passwords, crypto keys, and other contraptions that are virtually unbreakable as compared against something like "call the locksmith". As people age, I think these concerns will begin to be taken much more seriously, but it shows the crucial importance of fully utilizing things like the GDPR-mandated "fork over your data" export and becoming proficient in backup, archiving, and system forensics. This is an area of some interest to me, so when my grandmother died a couple of years ago, I worked quickly to get a bit-for-bit copy of every user-accessible digital device in her house. I got almost everything, but a distant family member absconded with the iPad, which had been her primary computing device for the last couple of years of her life, before I could even get on a plane. [Tangential pro-tip here: large files can and do lose bits. Create multiple copies, create parity files, and don't rely blindly on either RAID or filesystem-level checksums.] Fortunately, she was in her mid-90s and while she enjoyed technology, she also maintained handwritten journals for over 50 years, so we still have the main records of her legacy. But things will be different for people not-all-that-much younger.