Or the trail of emails, notes, memos, etc that tells how we came to that knowledge, why we made that decision, why that particular path was chosen, etc. PCs, laptops, mobile devices contain a wealth of information that belongs to an individual or often, a company or organization. When that device goes to the Great Recycling Bin in the Sky, usually through a fried hard drive which makes the data it contains inaccessible, all that data is lost.
Fade to black. I attended a lecture once that said in 1900 human knowledge was doubling every 50 years. In 1950 it was every 25 years, in 1998 (when I heard this) it was every 10 years, and by 2020 it would be every 72 days. Say what? How do we capture that? How do we know what we know when it’s all captured in disparate databases, disparate devices, in different forms?