“There is no permanence”

Utnapishtim’s words to Gilgamesh echo in an article in the New York Times:

The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures—millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.

Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.