In his post on the passing of Gary Allen:
It breaks my heart that his site is down. We shouldn’t have to depend on The Internet Archive to keep online writing available in perpetuity.
No, we shouldn’t. Unfortunately, I really don’t know what the solution is. All of my articles and writings from Google Voice (SMS), Facebook, Photos, WordPress, Tweets and even my LiveJournal posts from 1999 are all backed up on a hard drive that’s synced to a cloud. My family can access my documented life since 8th grade in high school with my password. Those docs won’t live online though. As URLs expire, hosting plans are cancelled and sites like Twitter and YouTube evolve or go away, my documented life online will cease to exist.
I’m not a great writer but maybe someone will want to read something I wrote and won’t be able to unless they put a letter in the mail to my Father who digs up an old hard drive and plugs it into his computer.