> modern technology is literally erasing our pasts

It's not modern technology that's erasing our pasts, but cloud-based services owned by someone else. So I'v always keen on local software - for instance, I'm currently upgrading my was staled desktop mindmap software (http://innovationgear.com/mind-mapping-software/) ;)

Modern technology erases it too. I am already seeing the drives that I used in college to store my raw camera files and LR catalogs degrade to the point of not being able to read the data as I try this month to move them to fresh storage. For some of my oldest photos, I only have whatever processed JPGs I happened to upload to a cloud provider that stuck around this long. The silver-based negatives from my film work at that time, though, are still fine.

Might be a long shot, but GRCs Spinrite has saved a couple drives of mine. It won't work if there's a problem with the physical connection to the drive but almost everything else it can fix (at least momentarily) and actually grants a nice speed boost in the process for drives that have gotten too messy.

Aside from all the flashy handwavy marketing "technospeak" what SpinRite actually does under the hood is re-read each bit from the disk thousands of times and then see if it gets more 0s or 1s.

It works well when a drive is past the point where its internal error correction code no longer works, but you just want to beat the right answer out of it with a baseball bat.

These days professional disk recovery by a lab is sub-$1000 and they recommend not using brute force tools like Spinrite because it can also exacerbate the problem before they get hands on it.

I just checked, this isn't true. I've Google Calendar entries from over 10 years ago. Where did you get the idea that they delete anything older than 2 years?

There is a setting in one's Google account to keep one's data forever or automatically delete it after a certain time period, perhaps they changed it?

(side note: the title of this post is a little sensational imo. the past has always "disappeared". Don't forget that you will die some day and eventually there will be no trace of your existence)

where is this setting?

In the "Activity Controls"[0] section of one's google account, there's an option for "auto-delete".

Now that I'm looking for it, I don't see Calendar listed as one of the products controlled here, but it might be grouped under GMail or something.

[0] https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols

Uh, my gmail stops at ~2009 or so...

I lost a bunch of emails from my now passed mother which I went to go look for, and found out that Gmail chopped history.

Yikes! Just checked and I have emails going back to 2000 (imported, account is from 2007) in my Gmail. It is a workspace account though.

Many offline calendar apps do prune old calendar items after a certain amount of time ... and sync that pruning back to GCal.

I've only got 1 year of calendar entries on the official Google Calendar app on an up-to-date Android 12 phone. A quick search suggests the mobile app only stores 1 year but allows searching of 2 years[0], but the desktop/browser one longer, so that must have been where I got the 2 years from. Unfortunately I'm out on my mobile now so won't be able to confirm desktop/browser until later.

[0] https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/818677/how-far-ba...

Try generating a Google Takeout from https://takeout.google.com/ and see what turns up in it.

While it's always interesting/practical ("just because") to have a full takeout sitting around locally, that would probably create a multiple GB tome (all of Gmail, Drive, ...) that would a day or two to generate and then potentially a while more to download, so for this experiment hitting "Deselect all" and then checking "Calendar" should be good enough.

The process of generating the takeout archive and downloading it are distinctly separate steps with some indeterminate amount of time in between, so you could very likely initiate the takeout from your phone, then follow up on the download link(s) it emails you when you get to a computer (IIRC the archive(s) hang around for a couple of days).

If you do indeed find deleted entries (nooo), I found that (a) Google Calendar itself has no auto-delete functionality (https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/3530801/how-do-i-...), but that if you have your calendar set up to sync with other software, that software might be issuing "deletion" requests (possibly under the guise of auto-cleanup...?) that is then getting synced back to Google Calendar (https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/8849196/my-calend..., https://www.makeuseof.com/events-deleted-automatically-googl...).

Back at a desktop computer now. Thanks for the tip. The only time I'd used Google Takeout was when I migrated away from Google Play Music, but in that case it generated 100s of gigabytes of data over dozens of zip files so I didn't do much with it in the end. Looks like it is quite useable for Google Calendar though. I've data going back to 2013, which is when I moved from an Evolution (offline) calendar to the (online) Google one, so it is quite possible it could go back longer for people who have been using it longer. And it turns out that my daughter had been to a birthday party at the same building and floor in 2014, but at a different door (flat 3 rather than flat 2).

My god you people are everywhere now...

> you people

Out of curiosity, what people are you referring to?

I assume they are referring to how the question posed by the GP was worded as if this conversation was happening on Reddit, and this is not Reddit.

Exactly that

I think that was a Poe's law moment.

> Not just calendar entries, but messaging systems

Logged in to my yahoo account that I haven't used in more than 10 years to look at some convos I've had with a good friend. There was nothing there. Yahoo forums are full of people that want to recover messages from their deceased loved ones, and won't be able to.

I find it fascinating that the only traces remaining of our lives will probably be archived on some NSA server somewhere... Flashbacks of that X-Files episode with the underground bunkers full of DNA.

A client of mine had his email account accessed by somebody in Nigeria (could see date and location of last login). That person then deleted everything after accessing the account.

That's why manual backing up of your chatlogs is such an amazing (and often cringey) thing. Just don't back them up anywhere online.

I've got conversations from 15+ years ago with girls I liked, friends I loved and everything in between. It's hard to watch, but if I ever feel nostalgic I can bring them up in a flick.

I'm not even 30 yet.

Not to start a war but iCalender has saved everything since I first started using an iPhone in 2013.

edit: Make that 2011

There used to be an old restriction for the (official) mobile apps to sync 1 year in the past. I don't experience this anymore, so appears to be lifted. Maybe using some legacy client?

Interesting anecdote! It facilitates to rewrite the past, influence the present, control the future. We need to be mindful where to invest our records.

I've moved a bunch of times in my life. Each time, I move a box full of junk that's been sitting there since the last move. I never open it or go through it, and I always forget about it until the next move. Certainly there must be some attachment to the junk, but I never think about it until I move. I'm not sure that my digital junk is any different.