Well, I can see I didn't express myself clearly enough.

I was not advocating dumping everything that was stored electronically - far from it.  As somebody who has just started storing his bits and pieces of information (i.e. useful email messages, phone conversation records and sections of text from reports) in HTML format so that he can use his company's intranet search engine to find useful stuff in the future .... it would be rather stupid of me to advocate not storing stuff in electronic format.

And yep, I have problems accessing files I created 10 years ago and religiously saved on LABELLED 5 ½" floppy disks, both because machines with those disk drives are few and far behind and because the software to view the files is no longer readily accessible.

Let alone access files for work done in the last few years, because we have no convenient way of searching other than by filename, which is coded in such a way that it is merely a referencing system by author and type of document.

Add to this the wonders of the Internet, where storage of information is dependent on the continued payment of fees for access, so that a very useful site might disappear overnight because the owner forgot to pay the ISP the fee, or because the ISP went bust ...

Sure is a problem.

BUT:

My point was not that we shouldn't store the information, nor that we shouldn't try to be better than ever before, with fancy cataloguing systems and archival procedures to ensure that hardware and software required to access the storage media are also preserved, and the electronic information is regular updated to contemporary media ...

RATHER that we are all human (surprise, surprise), and even with the best of intentions, a significant proportion of the information is going to be lost, even if it is stored away and catalogued.  I am sure that the majority of <<pinhead packrats>> have information tucked away in their systems (be they vertical or otherwise) which they have completely forgotten about, and which a search of their catalogue (if it is up to date) would not necessarily reveal.

Chance is a wonderful thing!

david