The futile Act of saving things digitally

 The problem with digital is that things change.

 I wrote my first book and many magazine and newspaper articles on a typewriter. Had paper copies done with carbon paper. (If I had kept them, they'd be all smeary today.) Then I wrote on a Commodore 64. There was no digital record saved. Wrote more on various Apple computers, but nothing can read those 5-inch floppy disks anymore, so I tossed them. The next books were recorded on 3-inch disks. Also now in the trash.

 In the late 1990s and early 2000s, my husband told me to stop printing out copies of what I wrote because they were all saved on the computer. Yeah - Right. (not) They were saved , but no way can my 2022 computer read those old versions of AppleWorks and ClarisWorks. 

Now, my latest Apple iMac grabs everything to save on the 'cloud.' Which means I can't access them if I have no internet service. (which is why I now save writing stuff on Dropbox, because I can work on those files even without internet as long as I save them to Dropbox once I reach Internet service again.)

 I imagine that saving digital files of photographs may have gone through the same history -- and that everything saved today will be unreadable in the future.  🙁