Must be nice. I've never worked in a lab where coffee and tea were provided. My lab books from the 1980s are still in fine form, because lab books are precious

Must be nice. I've never worked in a lab where coffee and tea were provided. My lab books from the 1980s are still in fine form, because lab books are precious so people look after them. (Also, I was scared of losing something, so I photocopied them a month at a time, and stored the copies in a different location.) Since I put a table of contents at the start of each book, with a small set of keywords listed by every title, I can find things pretty well. A lot of people on this thread have stressed the importance of immutability, and that is really significant. When I found an error, I would make a new entry (on another page, maybe in another book) that corrected the error, and added information about this to a changelog. Oh, and I entered the table-of-contents line into a plain-text computer file for each entry, so I could search for things by phrase or keyword (grep is your friend). With a notebook with high-quality paper and a pen with good ink (I used India ink a lot, which is waterproof), the notes will easily last 100 years, maybe 1000 years. Do I think Apple's ipad format will last that long, or that Apple itself will? Not so much.