Should auto-archiving be the new normal?

A re-post of a 2020 BBC article about the environmental costs of all that data we unthinkingly store popped up in my feed today:

🔗 Climate change: Can sending fewer emails really save the planet?

It's a sobering thought, really. All those gifs, memes, PDF-format bills, the icons from various email signatures ... sitting out there somewhere, sitting there indefinitely, and consuming energy all the while.

This very system is also, technologically, a very impressive feat—because I can generally access an email and its attached images from 5, 6, ... however many years ago—and view them in an instant. Are people ready to give that up?

Is it even reasonable for people to expect this, though? I definitely want to keep my access to various docs and important pics that have been shared with me by email, however long ago it happened, but perhaps there is a middle ground in which stored content that has not been accessed in over 2 years is moved to long term storage. This might be implemented with something akin to Amazon Glacier, which is a service offering magnetic tape-based storage, that I assume has far lower environmental costs.

There's nothing super revolutionary about this, of course, as numerous services—and perhaps private, on-premises services in particular—likely already do this. After all, it makes sense, and not just for environmental reasons. The key, I think, is to normalise it and bring it to into the mainstream.

Then, when a user like me tries to access that document from 2019, the application (an email client, in this instance) simply tells me it isn't immediately available: it explains the content is archived and asks, do I wish to retrieve it? Again, thinking of technologies like Glacier, this is a process that could take upwards of 24 hours ... but perhaps that's actually pretty reasonable, and something we can acclimatise the masses to?

Since technology is always evolving, and that process of evolution also includes storage technology, perhaps those archive recall times won't always be so long—or, even if they are, perhaps we can further reduce the (environmental) costs associated with them.

Wrote this one day, and got an email from Slack the next, in relation to a free workspace I'm a part of. It linked me to this policy change covering their plans to automatically delete data after one year (archived snapshot).

It doesn't read like there are any direct environmental motivations behind the change, but it is still a pretty good example of environmental and economic considerations aligning pretty nicely. The cost of keeping all that data alive, and the amount of data that was left rotting through lack of conversions to paid plans, must have been pretty real.