> a terrifyingly large amount of history would suddenly blink from existence
One response to that is the "The Offline Internet Archive" [0], which includes software to crawl Internet Archive collections and store them to a local server [1].
One response to that is the "The Offline Internet Archive" [0], which includes software to crawl Internet Archive collections and store them to a local server [1].
On the other hand you can already have 24 20TB HDDs for maybe $7000 (with required other hardware), and that's almost 0.5 petabytes. I imagine it would be able to archive all things a single person cares about. Now only if there was a way to interconnect these smaller storage pods to each other..
Counter examples exist: the NASA moon landing tapes were lost, but a copy was found in a horde in Australia. Dr Who episodes, lost by the BBC, have been collected from fans' recordings, etc.
There's some difficulty in connecting those who want the info with those who have it, but if the search gets enough publicity, it can work. This seems like a problem that could be solved with software.