Oh, I think it remains to be seen whether cloud computing will make the problem better or worse. If all of our data is eventually consolidated with a few very l

Oh, I think it remains to be seen whether cloud computing will make the problem better or worse. If all of our data is eventually consolidated with a few very large companies who do a good job of preserving it and keeping it accessible to us, then that may be an improvement. But keep in mind that these companies are not in the archival business. Fresh data is a lot more valuable to them than old stuff. Yes, Google scans old books and whatnot but that's a tiny amount of data compared to everyone's digital junk heap that they accumulate over a lifetime. If I consider everything I've ever written on the internet to be my "files" then I've already lost a great deal of it just because I can't keep track of where it all is, let alone whether it's still online at all.