Is my life’s work slowly being erased by the Internet?

I learned a valuable lesson in high school when a paper that I had saved to my computer (an Apple IIe) was lost. With a typing speed hovering around 10 words a minute, it was painful. Since that experience, I have backed up my data and made sure I knew how to restore files. Later I learned about the dangers of digital media (it degrades more quickly than paper, and formats change (try opening your MSWord 1.0 documents)). But with the Internet and stable formats like HTML and pdf, it seemed like the problem of digital storage was largely solved. Yes, links got broken, but a quick Google search would find the correct URL, and cloud storage is almost too cheap to meter!

Boy, was I wrong!!

I found this out recently when looking for one of my old Columbia Daily Tribune columns on the Tribune website. It turns out that after Gatehouse Media purchased the Tribune in 2016, the cost of maintaining the archive of old columns and stories was not an expense they wanted to incur (and there was probably some expense with importing the data into their systems). So, they ditched the Tribune’s archive, keeping only new, post-acquisition articles. Luckily, the wicked-smart librarians at the Daniel Boone Regional library got a database company to take over the archive and provide free access for library members. I quickly scraped all my old…