I have pictures, slides, official documents (a few) and some negatives from family in pre-internet and pre cheap disk drive times. And Dad's paintings.

Legible media were a way of "preserving what's worth preserving" via what wasn't thrown away, and give or take disaster or deliberate shredding.

A kind of quality ranking, but what do we do in the age of bot clickbait "quantity over quality?"

Must we keep everything? I'll keep my slides even after that are scanned, but I already sorted out the best out of space and access concerns.

Sometimes constraints nudge us in the "right" direction.

Looking at my disk drives (seriously in need of sorting ) very little is unique (my products) [0], a lot of photo files and scans, and a ton of material I downloaded from the internet, of which a tiny bit is really still useful.

And books and music score downloads, which will probaby be safely archived by others.

I don't regret giving away hundreds of pounds of printed musical scores. They never laid flat, anyway. The ipad does.

[0] even when 100mb disks were common, one author said that his writings would fit on a floppy.

Assuming that data degradation is not an issue and your data is available on a magnetic drive perhaps a future archeologist would have access to a quantum machine that would make decryption of the media possible.

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Even without encryption, data degradation will eventually erase most flash, optical and magnetic media.

Project Silica is a pretty cool example of how you could potentially circumvent this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...