But many many thanks to them and for what they do.
In the end, in a couple hundred years, all of it may be lost. Even photographs won't last forever.
Will probably involve some form of re-recording and conversion in order to preserve it well after the originals are lost.
Even printing out a digital picture will not last as long as a photo. The dies in your ink jet printer have a shelf life.
They say that over 70% of all silent feature movies are lost to time (flamable/decomposing nitrate film stock).
I’d bet that more that 50% of all website pages created between 1994 and 2000 are lost. And there are blogs, ramblings, personal history accounts, genealogical data, etc that was posted.
People take thousands of photos with digital cameras yet are not so prone to saving all of those images to some cloud storage or hardcopy.
I’ve never received numerous “cellphone photos” when the phone was lost/broken/stolen etc. before it was transmitted to me.
The current “documents” are prone to being lost within 20 years.
You can go to a antique show or yardsale and buy old postcards or photo albums. NO ONE will be selling an unwiped harddrive at a yardsale with the intention that you will be rummaging through the content.
Oddly enough, some of the earliest forms of photography can last MUCH longer than present-day films if they are not mechanically damaged. I have color photos from the 50’s that are falling apart.