Don’t Expect the Internet to Archive for You (And Don’t Expect the Internet Archive to Do It Either)

Not long ago, my mother’s cousin Charles showed me the proposal packages he had once put together. They came in great 3-ring binders, all the photos and text laid out on the heavy pages by hand with glue. It was truly an artifact from another era — with an almost homemade (office-made?) quality to it, completely belying the hours that were surely put into it. It was, no doubt, weeks of work he held.

The ease of the digital realm confuses us. It stands to reason that just as layout no longer involves glue and manual dexterity (not to mention a sense of permanence once a page is set), that the same mechanisms will save the work for us. Most of us have, with a few keystrokes, accidentally deleted a day’s work to know that this is an illusion.

In other words, we learn this the hard way.

Here’s some behind-the-scenes dictionary intrigue: I used to work in marketing and content strategy for Oxford Dictionaries. The Oxford brand, despite its prominence in print, had always struggled to adapt to the wilds of the digital age, coming late to the age of SEO — critical if you were going to survive in a world where people rely on Google for dictionary definitions. Content played an outsize role in boosting your site’s search rankings, and my role was part of the multi-pronged solution.

In my time at Oxford, I produced nearly 200 pieces of content, from grammar and spelling guides to deep word histories to language quizzes.

I saved none of it.

Well, that’s not quite right. I saved some of it, a very small slice of it. A handful of my favorite pieces were PDF’d direct from the website and added to a portfolio. The rest of them, though? I thought they would live forever. After all, the site had been chugging along for years before I arrived. I figured that my contributions to the content stream would merely recede into the distant backwaters of the blog archive, buried deep on, say, page 76.

You can see where this is going.

At some point in the past couple of months, Oxford decided the website wasn’t worth the trouble. They’d never figured out how to compete with Dictionary.com and Merriam Webster for traffic and thus never sufficiently monetized the site. While the website itself was no asset, the lexical data — the words and their definitions — certainly were. So Oxford did the next best thing and licensed the content out to their longtime rival Dictionary.com, who had long been looking for a way into the World English market. (Dictionary.com, if you weren’t aware, only specialized in American English — it’s not as visible if you live outside the US.) Dictionary.com set up a “sister site” under the banner Lexico.com, redirected all the relevant backlinks, and voila! they had a legitimately competitive World English dictionary website.

In the midst of all this shuffle, though, every blog post I ever wrote disappeared.

When I reached out to a former colleague at Oxford, she told me that the Lexico team had planned on transferring it over, but just didn’t get around to it before their hard launch date. And, she added, they might not ever get around it.

Gulp.

Poof. The minutiae of media companies had vaporized a year and a half of my work. Hundreds of thousands of words of writing about words, gone.

Of course, some of the content lives on, if only in a limbo or half-life. Google has a handful of pages cached, but has already deleted the bulk of them (and redirected to the Lexico.com homepage). My best bet is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but not everything has been captured there.

So why does any of this matter?

It matters because even as the digital age has made everyday tasks hugely convenient for us — allowing us to easily store documents and other digital ephemera that a previous generation would have tended to in physical form — any stock you place in the value of a digital archive is a poor investment. Look no further than the troubling news that MySpace lost over 50 million of its users’ uploaded songs, purportedly all the music uploaded to the service between 2003 and 2015.

Just like my wordy blog posts: Poof.

In an age of free email and social media photo repositories that do the work of filing cabinets and scrapbooks, stories like this can come as a surprise. You have to remember: most of the Internet doesn’t care about you, beyond the dollar signs it sees in your data.

So what to do?

Save you work.

That doesn’t mean save all of it, of course. (Some qualifications packages, I can admit, are better off being forgotten.) But save your work. Physical copies aren’t always possible, but they can serve a crucial role as a record of your developing work over time. If digital is the way of your workplace, then at least take the time to organize your project folder.

That means that when a project or pursuit comes to a close, don’t leave your working files as they were, all willy-nilly with woolly unfinished drafts and labyrinthine folder structures.

Likely, this will feel a dull exercise as you do it. But you’ll thank yourself when you need something, and you’ll know where to find it.