Where's my file?

Everything you've spent years working on can disappear from the Internet in a trice

Imagine this then: one day you wake up. Mark Zuckerberg, heartbroken about something or the other the previous night, in a bitter rage and hopped up on black coffee and Red Bull, has decided to delete every single post on Facebook. Oh, and Instagram too. All those memories. All those connections. Photos of loved, liked and deeply hated ones. Updates about your breakfast. Abstract open letters to lost loves. Hashtags. Nofilters. Sponcon. The "It's complicated"relationship statuses. Rants. All those very real personal histories. Lost to the ether.

It's alarmist, but not beyond the realms of possibility. The Internet, by its very design, is a fragile ecosystem that could go balls-up any second. It's never still, It's forever moving, into new worlds of uncertainty. A change in the law here, a crashed server there, a shift in technology.

So what do we do then? Do we live with the fear that huge parts of digital history could be erased one day? Do we live in denial? Do we safeguard against the inevitability by turning into Luddites and moving back to the pre-digital world? The answer to all these questions is varying degrees of 'no'.