Accidental Archivists

Chapter 1: The Vanishing Point

At 2:07 a.m. on the morning of March 18, 2020, an electrical fault in a backup generator sent a spark into a ceiling void of a four-story building in Strasbourg, France. The building was unremarkable—a beige, windowless structure on the outskirts of the city that looked more like a warehouse than a vault of memory. Inside, however, were rows of humming server racks belonging to OVHcloud, one of Europe’s largest cloud-computing providers. The company hosted data for millions of customers: government agencies, hospitals, e-commerce platforms, and, crucially, the personal archives of ordinary people. The fire spread with a ferocity that surprised even the firefighters. By the time it was contained, just after dawn, an entire data center—designated SBG2—was gutted. The heat had been so intense that the server racks had fused into twisted metal sculptures. The water from the hoses had done as much damage as the flames. In a single night, millions of websites, databases, and files were gone.

The immediate aftermath was a flurry of headlines about disrupted services and financial losses—the costliest industrial accident in the region’s history, they said. But lost in the coverage was a smaller, quieter devastation: the wedding photos stored on a defunct social network, the unpublished novel kept only in a drafts folder, the family tree an amateur genealogist had spent a decade compiling. None of this was backed up elsewhere. It existed in a single location, on a single hard drive, in a single data center