Not the person you replied to, but: Documents rarely survive just by being physically durable. They survive first by people making an effort to preserve them. D

Not the person you replied to, but: Documents rarely survive just by being physically durable. They survive first by people making an effort to preserve them. Deja News might be the most complete archive, but it's not the only effort to preserve Usenet. For example: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-googlegroups https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-googlegroups It's a roundabout way to do it, but probably includes enough context on what's missing for a historian to dig into other archives to find it. History is like RAID: given enough parity information, you can reconstruct much of what's missing. That's how we know so many lost texts exist, and occasionally find them: stuff we do have references them and sometimes offers clues on where to find it. Digital information in particular benefits from getting smaller relative to available storage size. Running a Usenet server used to be a huge financial burden. Now I could hold most of it on a keychain. This makes replicating it across the planet to resist the chaos of human nature easier. It might die in one place, but it's also somewhere else. It would take a world-ending event to wipe out anything you might find in /r/DataHoarder.