Only papers from famous people were kept. Even so, for example, HP's historical archive was all on paper and placed in a single building. Which burned down.
The WTC collapse destroyed the unpublished archive of Kennedy pictures.
> a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, "more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information." [1]
I doubt that the US Supreme Court was regularly losing track of cited documents before "information technology" came along. A lot of documents may be recoverable even if the original URLs are broken, but is this really the best we can do to manage information in the information age?
Then again material published in journals and books is greater than material published on the internet, if for nothing other than it can be relied upon to be found in decades to come.
https://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/introduction/
"By law, a copy of every UK print publication must be given to the British Library by its publishers, and to five other major libraries that request it. This system is called legal deposit and has been a part of English law since 1662.
From 6 April 2013, legal deposit also covers material published digitally and online"
Although it is interesting (and a bit depressing) that we can't really seem to escape that model for preserving knowledge over the long term. Physical media needs patronage, buildings, printing presses, etc, while digital media needs infrastructure, manufacturing, programmers, etc.
At the time of Gutenberg, there were about 30,000 books in all of Europe. (Inthink -- research suggests this may be higher, see mss. chart below.) Not titles, but books: individual, discreet, volumes. The University of Paris in 1200 had on the order of 2,000 volumes, amongst the largest collections of the time.
There were something shy of one billion volumes by 1800. Publishing in England during the 19th century was about 1,000 titles/yr. For much of the 2nd half of the 20th century, the US Library of Congress added about 300,000 titles/yr. That's remained fairlyconstant, though "nontraditional" publishing (self-published and on-demand titles) take this to over one million titles annually.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/Eu...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/24/Eu...
Google has counted the total number of books now in existence (titles), and came up with 129,864,880.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7930273/Google...
http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-...
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae is a comprehensive archive of all known surviving Ancient Greek literature:
Today the Online TLG contains more than 110 million words from over 10,000 works associated with 4,000 authors and is constantly updated and improved with new features and texts.
http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/tlg.php
(Many of the authors survive only in fragmentary quotation.)
Given that 100k words is a substantial book (about 400 pages), the entire surviving Greek bibliography -- every retained written word -- would be 1,000 such volumes.
A bit under 5 GB of uncompressed text.
The chemical stability of clay means that, yes, some records have survived. They are a minute fraction of all ever created, and those represent a minute fraction of all information that existed to be recorded, but never was.
The largest surviving cuneiform archive is at the British Museum, comprised of about 130,000 tablets, though the core collection is about 30,000. Each tablet is more analogous to a page than a book.
https://members.bib-arch.org/biblical-archaeology-review/31/...