The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age

In June 2024, more than 20 years of music journalism disappeared when the MTV News archives were taken offline. This, and other online data wipeouts (like the accidental deletion of MySpace in 2016) have archivists alarm bells ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. There is more stuff being created now than at any time in history—but  our data is more fragile than ever. Over the past two decades, the Internet Archive has amassed a gigantic library of material scraped from around the web. Its Wayback Machine, which lets users rewind to see how certain websites looked at any point in time, has more than 800 billion web pages stored and captures a further 650 million each day. It’s a Sisyphean task. As a society, we’re creating so much new stuff that we must always delete more things than we did the year before, says Jack Cushman, director at Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab, where he helps libraries and technologists learn from one another. We “have to figure out what gets saved and what doesn’t,” he says. “And how do we decide?”