Online isn't forever

Make sure you can still find the information you need

We are often warned that “online is forever.” That mildly obscene comment you left on a social media post as a teenager could be found by a potential employer when you are job hunting at age 35. It’s a sobering realization.

But unfortunately, if embarrassing things last, sometimes useful stuff disappears for various reasons. It turns out that online isn’t forever for everything! Indeed, anything digital could no longer be accessible in certain circumstances.

For instance, I wrote a ton of columns for USA Today in the early days of my career. Many of these are no longer easily accessible in USA Today’s online archive. I have printed versions of most of them, but that’s not as easy to send or access. I was trying to find an article I wrote on mega-families back in 2002 to check something and the hunt went on for a while.

Your inbox could disappear

That’s not the world’s worst tragedy for sure, but sometimes people have digital information they really need. I keep reading stories of people who get fired or laid off from their jobs and can’t access stuff on their work server or in their work email that’s actually personal. Obviously, it’s awful to lose a job. It adds to the awfulness if you can’t access your eyeglasses prescription or finance spreadsheet or Christmas card list or the presentation you are giving at that industry conference or that wonderful recommendation letter your mentor wrote for you but you were just keeping as an attachment to the work email where he sent it. Yikes. One can debate the merits of “home-ing” from work, as the saying goes, but a lot of information workers do personal things on their lunch breaks, with the result that the info is on the work computer.

It’s pretty easy to set up a personal Gmail account and use Google Drive, so it might be worth doing that if you have a lot of information in your work email or on your work computers. Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting you forward any sensitive or secure information. But anything that is truly personal should be accessible to you, personally. And if there is work you’ve done that could be publicly shared, but mostly lives on your organization’s website, you might want to make a copy of that too. If you are laid off when your organization goes belly-up, they might not maintain the webpage, and you’re going to want access to that work.

When in doubt, save it

I am similarly wary of hosting a lot of content solely at some place like Instagram. I assume Instagram isn’t going anywhere, and that the powers that be will not unilaterally remove someone’s content but…you never know. If you wrote a really cool essay, maybe save that somewhere too, just like your photos are backed up.

Even little things might be worth saving. For instance, if you apply for a job, save the job description. You don’t want to find yourself preparing for an interview but unable to review the job description because it’s no longer posted. If you cite an Internet source in a work document or even on a personal blog, capture it somehow, even as a screenshot, so if you or someone else needs to refer to the source in the future, you can. It’s convenient to keep links on file for pages you’ll want to return to. But don’t count on a web link working for you forever. It might go behind a paywall. Or the site will get acquired and the new owners will take it in a different direction.

In other words, it’s wise not to count on online being forever. If you’ll need something, save it somewhere you will be able to access. Then that will be one less thing to worry about.