Most of us assume our digital data will outlast us. The evidence suggests otherwise. Three forces work against long-term survival — and understanding them is the first step to building something that genuinely persists.
How quickly the past becomes shrouded
If you've ever researched your family tree, you've probably been able to trace your ancestors back several generations. You've also probably found that the further back you go, the less you actually know about the people you find. A name, a date, a place. In as little as two or three generations, the texture of a life disappears almost entirely.
We leave our digital imprint in many places — social media, email, photographs, messages. The instinct is to assume this scattering of information will help future generations build a picture of us. The reality is more sobering. Scattered data does very little to create a coherent portrait, even if it survives long enough to be found. And the uncomfortable truth is that survival is far from guaranteed.
In generations to come, how will you be remembered? Will it be the snatches of anecdotes passed on by relatives — or will you leave a detailed and coherent portrait of the way you want to be remembered?
That is still the right question. But answering it requires understanding why the default answer — "my data will survive" — is almost certainly wrong. There are three distinct forces working against it.
Human Intervention
There have been many examples in the last hundred years of how information and media that should have been preserved for posterity was lost — not through accident, but through decision. In 1948, Universal Studios destroyed most of the 5,000 films it had produced during the silent era. Across all studios of that period, less than 25% of silent films survive. The people who made those decisions simply didn't see the long-term value in what they were discarding.
The same dynamic applies to the companies that hold your data today. They seem strong and prosperous now. But over decades, financial pressures change priorities. Data that is old and no longer commercially relevant becomes a cost centre, not an asset. Twenty years ago, millions of people uploaded extensive content to MySpace — then the dominant social platform, as apparently permanent as anything on the internet. In 2019 it emerged that MySpace had lost all content uploaded before 2016. A decade of people's lives, simply gone.
In every case, the data was lost because someone had to make a decision, and the data wasn't valuable enough to the decision-maker to justify preserving it. Your data is not an exception to this pattern.
Technological Change
The last fifty years have seen radical changes in how we store information. Formats that seemed permanent — floppy disks, VHS, CD-ROMs — became unreadable within a generation, not because the data decayed, but because the devices capable of reading them disappeared from common use.
There is no reason to believe this pattern has ended. Audio, video, and image formats that are universal today will be archaic in fifty years, replaced by compression techniques and storage architectures that don't yet exist. Data doesn't just need to survive — it needs to be actively migrated as the technology around it changes. That migration requires a commitment that most storage solutions simply don't make.
An open, non-proprietary format — one that isn't dependent on a single company's technology choices — is the only architecture that has any realistic chance of remaining accessible across the timescales that actually matter for a life story.
Information Decay
Even setting aside human decisions and technological change, digital storage media itself degrades. Hard drives used for data storage will fail within fifteen to twenty years for the majority of units, despite optimistic manufacturer specifications. Optical media — CD, DVD, Blu-Ray — fares somewhat better under ideal conditions, with accelerated aging analyses suggesting lifespans potentially exceeding thirty years. Magnetic tape storage is broadly comparable.
In each case, fifty years is an ambitious target under the best circumstances. A life story that needs to survive a century requires redundancy, active management, and a genuine commitment to keep migrating the data as storage technologies evolve. A file sitting on a hard drive in a drawer — or on a server managed by a company that doesn't know you exist — is unlikely to make it.
What survival actually requires
Taken together, these three forces describe a problem that has no passive solution. Data that is left to look after itself will not survive across the timescales that matter for a life story. Survival requires active custodianship: redundancy, format migration, and a commitment from someone — an institution, a company, a trusted party — to keep doing the work even when there is no immediate commercial reason to do so.
This is why the question of permanence sits at the centre of everything RAGMI Labs is building. The application creates the folio. The Human Context Protocol ensures it is stored in an open, non-proprietary format that doesn't depend on our technology continuing to exist. And The Vault — when it opens — will be the custodial layer: the commitment to keep the folio alive, migrated, and accessible to the people it was built for.
Not because it is commercially valuable. Because it is irreplaceable.