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by m-i-l·4y ago·view on hn ↗
Anecdote: On of the best friends of my oldest daughter moved to a new rented flat recently. When I saw the address for a playdate, I recognised it and said to my daughter "I think you went to a birthday party at this address when you were 3-5 years old when another of your friends must have lived here". To corroborate this, I looked up the calendar on my phone, where I'm pretty organised about putting dates and locations of events. However, at that point I discovered that Google Calendar only keeps 2 years of history!

So modern technology is literally erasing our pasts. Not just calendar entries, but messaging systems (people used to keep handwritten letters for decades), and possibly even photos (if we're not careful about preserving them).

Edit: See my clarification of the 2 years in comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30084620 below. I still think the point remains - we do not own or value our digital data in the same way as physical objects, and there is a much heightened risk of that data disappearing as a result, either by the owners of the platforms the data is stored on archiving the data or by us not valuing it enough to preserve exports and backups through long periods of time.

8 comments
> modern technology is literally erasing our pasts

It's not modern technology that's erasing our pasts, but cloud-based services owned by someone else. So I'v always keen on local software - for instance, I'm currently upgrading my was staled desktop mindmap software (http://innovationgear.com/mind-mapping-software/) ;)

Modern technology erases it too. I am already seeing the drives that I used in college to store my raw camera files and LR catalogs degrade to the point of not being able to read the data as I try this month to move them to fresh storage. For some of my oldest photos, I only have whatever processed JPGs I happened to upload to a cloud provider that stuck around this long. The silver-based negatives from my film work at that time, though, are still fine.
Might be a long shot, but GRCs Spinrite has saved a couple drives of mine. It won't work if there's a problem with the physical connection to the drive but almost everything else it can fix (at least momentarily) and actually grants a nice speed boost in the process for drives that have gotten too messy.
Aside from all the flashy handwavy marketing "technospeak" what SpinRite actually does under the hood is re-read each bit from the disk thousands of times and then see if it gets more 0s or 1s.

It works well when a drive is past the point where its internal error correction code no longer works, but you just want to beat the right answer out of it with a baseball bat.

These days professional disk recovery by a lab is sub-$1000 and they recommend not using brute force tools like Spinrite because it can also exacerbate the problem before they get hands on it.

I just checked, this isn't true. I've Google Calendar entries from over 10 years ago. Where did you get the idea that they delete anything older than 2 years?
There is a setting in one's Google account to keep one's data forever or automatically delete it after a certain time period, perhaps they changed it?

(side note: the title of this post is a little sensational imo. the past has always "disappeared". Don't forget that you will die some day and eventually there will be no trace of your existence)

where is this setting?
In the "Activity Controls"[0] section of one's google account, there's an option for "auto-delete".

Now that I'm looking for it, I don't see Calendar listed as one of the products controlled here, but it might be grouped under GMail or something.

[0] https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols

Uh, my gmail stops at ~2009 or so...

I lost a bunch of emails from my now passed mother which I went to go look for, and found out that Gmail chopped history.

Yikes! Just checked and I have emails going back to 2000 (imported, account is from 2007) in my Gmail. It is a workspace account though.
> Not just calendar entries, but messaging systems

Logged in to my yahoo account that I haven't used in more than 10 years to look at some convos I've had with a good friend. There was nothing there. Yahoo forums are full of people that want to recover messages from their deceased loved ones, and won't be able to.

I find it fascinating that the only traces remaining of our lives will probably be archived on some NSA server somewhere... Flashbacks of that X-Files episode with the underground bunkers full of DNA.

A client of mine had his email account accessed by somebody in Nigeria (could see date and location of last login). That person then deleted everything after accessing the account.
That's why manual backing up of your chatlogs is such an amazing (and often cringey) thing. Just don't back them up anywhere online.

I've got conversations from 15+ years ago with girls I liked, friends I loved and everything in between. It's hard to watch, but if I ever feel nostalgic I can bring them up in a flick.

I'm not even 30 yet.

Not to start a war but iCalender has saved everything since I first started using an iPhone in 2013.

edit: Make that 2011

There used to be an old restriction for the (official) mobile apps to sync 1 year in the past. I don't experience this anymore, so appears to be lifted. Maybe using some legacy client?
Interesting anecdote! It facilitates to rewrite the past, influence the present, control the future. We need to be mindful where to invest our records.
I've moved a bunch of times in my life. Each time, I move a box full of junk that's been sitting there since the last move. I never open it or go through it, and I always forget about it until the next move. Certainly there must be some attachment to the junk, but I never think about it until I move. I'm not sure that my digital junk is any different.