Many criminal records, petty or otherwise, are public record. When archived, expunged or dismissed infractions never truly become that. A traffic violation or other petty misdemeanor from 20 years ago, that has been expunged from official record, can show up on a background check because companies archive public data. So, there is a flip side to this.

There's a lot of panic and overlap in the space; a way to coordinate these efforts would be helpful.

Internet Archive et al. made noise and promises but told volunteers to stop because they couldn't actually handle the ingest.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Archiveteam/comments/1jbgycm/us_gov...

These folks made a notable effort.

https://webrecorder.net/blog/2025-03-25-govarchive-us-and-mi...

Hypothetically: -Government leader says they're nuking data -Mad rush to back up data through other means -Government leader declares they've 'transferred the cost of maintaining data out of government, thus making for a smaller, more efficient, government'

I hate everything about this.

I made this related submission[0] recently but it was flagged.

This stuff is very important to talk about so I hope that this submission by rbanffy isn't also flagged.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43543075

Best thing I ever heard from the head of archives at the BBC:

Once you format shift, you will always be format shifting.

Keep your originals whenever you can.