Inspired by the post about the hieroglyphs the one dude hoped would last forever.
People always talk about future historians being confused at memes and old forums, but surely a lot of catastrophic events could just wipe out the internet wholesale, right? If something REALLY COOL 
like a giant meteor wiped out everybody, what if aliens came along and were deeply confused that our culture seems to end randomly in the mid 2010s, subsumed by an internet whose only remaining shreds are references in big scientific studies?
The history textbooks on our dumb asses would surely read "and the humans all talked into screens and used "hyper links" to share information and opinions. Very little is known about this obscure human ritual as no evidence can be found of its existence beyond scattered references in ancient texts contemporary to its existence."
Thinkin bout the impermanence of the internet rn
That's assuming the NSA isn't converting snapshots of the entire internet to tape and storing it in underground bunkers
i don't think we could produce enough tape for even a fraction of a snapshot. on top of that, there's too much data to even start sorting through what's worth saving and what's just junk
it makes sense to me that they just store absolutely everything always with the idea that at some point they'll be able to go back and efficiently sort through and decrypt it all