What If Your Shared Data Did Not Last Forever Online ... and Got Deleted?

People say that something you post to the Internet will be there forever. We even use this as a cautionary tale to be careful about what you post. Rarely discussed, though, is the opposite situation where something you assumed would be online and available to you forever gets deleted. Most of us are not particularly diligent about backing anything up and cloud storage has made it seem completely unnecessary to do so. It's basically there to back everything up so we don't have to, right? Unless that digital archive eventually becomes unavailable, of course.

The solution, as professor Paul Royster suggests, is that we need a “Data Preservation Day” where we all go through our online data and ensure we're not blindly trusting some third party like Google or Dropbox or Facebook to keep all of our data accessible forever. I realize this advice involves spending a painful number of hours doing something boring, but you probably manage to clean out your fridge every once in a while and that sucks too. The point is, just do it.