Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads "Preserve the media you can before it's gone forever." The Wikipedia article reads, "No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were transferred to film for editing before transmission and exist in their broadcast form. [88] Some episodes have been returned to the BBC from the archives of other countries that bought prints for broadcast or by private individuals who acquired them by various means. Early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved, as well as excerpts filmed from the television screen onto 8 mm cine film and clips that were shown on other programmes. Audio versions of all lost episodes exist from home viewers who made tape recordings of the show. Short clips from every story with the exception of Marco Polo (1964), "Mission to the Unknown" (1965) and The Massacre (1966) also exist."
I wish there were something like bittorrent that worked better as an archival mechanism. The weakness of bittorrent is that material tends to disappear completely when there is no longer widespread popular interest in it.
Was just thinking about this. Usenet guarantees a certain amount of time ~10 years, and a torrent only lasts as long as people are willing to seed. The problem is, long term seeding takes up too much individual space, and I never know when it's necessary. Obviously I'm not wasting 500GB of storage to seed something with 100+ seeders. More trackers should offer bonus points for things with less than 2-3 seeders to ensure long term survival of the media.
Usenet doesn't guarantee any time at all. Content is purged regularly if it's not being downloaded.