MySpace, the leading social network from the pre-Facebook days, has accidentally (?) deleted more than a decade’s worth of music. Every piece of music uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015, some 50 million songs from 14 million artists, is gone like tears in the rain.

This is an important lesson: digital does not last forever.

We’ve seen this happen again and again with user-submitted content; some of my own music was trashed back in 2003 when MP3.com was sold and its archive effectively destroyed. Always assume that sooner or later, remotely hosted services will be sold, will shut down or will do something unspeakable to your stuff.

But content you pay for isn’t forever either.

Your Spotify subscription, your Netflix account, your Apple Music: the availability of content on these services is not infinite. Contracts and licenses expire, catalogues are pruned, accidents happen, copyright holders revoke permissions… for myriad reasons, things disappear.

Sometimes things don’t disappear, but they stop working. My PlayStation told me today that some of the games I downloaded last year on the understanding that they were mine forever would lose most of their features later this year: the servers on which these older games depend will be switched off, removing features like online play and multiplayer. The games also depend on my PlayStation Plus subscription remaining current. If I don’t keep paying that, they stop working completely.

If you bought copy-protected music or movies in the early 2000s you may be familiar with a similar problem when authorisation servers are switched off: for example, in 2008 MSN and Yahoo both turned off the copy protection servers for their music services, so any downloads you’d bought could no longer be authorised. If you changed computer, you wouldn’t be able to authorise your legally purchased music to play on it.

There’s not much you can do about subscription services changing their catalogues, but for content you create yourself or that you’ve bought rather than rented it’s a very good idea to ensure that you have a local copy of whatever lives in the cloud. And while you’re at it, make sure that copy is in a format that’s free from copy protection, in a widely supported file format and in the best possible quality.