If you fully buy in to the notion of quantum entanglement, then everything is connected to everything else for all eternity forward and back in all available dimensions since all that is was a dot, a singularity if you will, of metaphysical and mathematical cotagentcy at the moment of the Big Bang and was one all-encompassing quantum soliton wavefunction of everything. In other words, it’s all connected because it never really disconnected in the first place.
That however, contradicted quantum mechanics microcausality. Preskill thus argued that quantum mechanics requires that the information emitted by a black hole must relate to information that fell in at an earlier time. This in turn meant that the view of black holes under general relativity must be modified in some way.
In 2004, Hawking conceded the bet because he came to believe that black hole horizons fluctuate and leak information, even if in garbled form that is incomprehensible. Hawking gave Preskill a copy of Total Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia. Thorne, however, declined to concede the bet, and physicists remain divided.
As for quantum entanglement, for our purposes, even if everything is always connected, that does not mean that we can access the information. In almost all instances, the information is lost to us because any once related particles have lost their coherence. Indeed, a quantum computer has to be isolated from outside influences in order to work.