When you can, keep everything!

Data is power, and man has known it for centuries. In these excerpts, the author juxtaposes some of the earliest data collectors, as early as 48 BCE, to today's age, where data is collected at every point of our lives & stored away

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If you were standing at the Port of Alexandria in Egypt on a fateful November night in 48 BCE, you'd be terrified. Smoke would choke you. The great glow of a hundred wooden ships burning would threaten to fry your corneas. You'd see embers and sparks flying into the night sky.

Some idiot in Julius Caesar's army had set the fire. What was Julius Caesar doing in Alexandria? It was all a little complicated. How Caesar fled there during the Roman civil war. How he got on the bad side of his host, the Emperor Ptolemy. How he got mixed up with Ptolemy's sister Cleopatra. And why the Romans thought burning the whole Egyptian fleet was a good way to protect themselves, when they themselves were encamped on land.

The main thing to pay attention to is the embers. One rises, lazily rides the breeze a short distance, lands on a large nearby building, which happens to be the Library of Alexandria, and sets it aflame. Thirty thousand scrolls and half of Greek civilization goes up in smoke.

A tragedy of ancient civilization.

A tragedy of data.

And more precisely, for our purposes, a tragedy of data storage.