I can clearly remember the first time I realized the essential paradox in the kind of work I do with older data. A researcher working on a biography asked me if I could recover the data from 99 5.25” and 3.5” floppy disks created between the mid-1980s and early-1990s. I spent dozens of hours imaging the disks, exporting the contents, extracting metadata, and weeding out the file slack and deleted data.