As someone who has retained probably 95% of all the non-spam e-mails he’s ever sent or received, I can state that the computer has not harmed this, it’s even made it easier.

Modern storage media is so vast — a CD, with 700mb, easily holds most, if not all, of a year’s e-mails — and a DVD is substantially larger, that there’s literally no reason, really, to ever toss out an e-mail.

You’ll probably need to keep a copy of the program that it’s stored using, and it may become difficult to recover it at some point, but, trust me, if someone wanted to access it, it’s still possible even without the program.

Contrast that with NASA’s retention of early data from the first space probes — it’s all on mag tape, the specs for the tape machines themselves, and thus the formatting used on the tapes, largely gone forever.

It may be possible to use forensic recovery/computing techniques to re-cover that data, it’s probably never going to be done.

So those probes no longer “exist” except as ephemeral memories of mankind.

You reminded me how much a mess MY filing cabinets are. Next thing I know, you’ll be going on about dusting around your TV,DVD player, audio entertainment center with all those CD’s and DVD’s stacked up on the shelves.

The written letter/card is much more warm and human than the binary arrangements of electrons. Shakespeare on paper is richer and more alive than Shakespeare on your e-book.