Inspired by the post about the hieroglyphs the one dude hoped would last forever.
People always talk about future historians being confused at memes and old forums, but surely a lot of catastrophic events could just wipe out the internet wholesale, right? If something REALLY COOL 
like a giant meteor wiped out everybody, what if aliens came along and were deeply confused that our culture seems to end randomly in the mid 2010s, subsumed by an internet whose only remaining shreds are references in big scientific studies?
The history textbooks on our dumb asses would surely read “and the humans all talked into screens and used “hyper links” to share information and opinions. Very little is known about this obscure human ritual as no evidence can be found of its existence beyond scattered references in ancient texts contemporary to its existence.”
Thinkin bout the impermanence of the internet rn
Data centers are 99.9% encrypted hard drives, a scavenger has a good chances of finding working ones, but no chance of decrypting a single one, and extraordinarily tiny chance of restoring one of the internet’s current backbones, S3. The chances of finding an unencrypted hard drive strongly correlates with finding a relatively small (non-notable) company or hobbyist user’s activity. Most small datacenter tenants are sharing multiple encrypted hard drives with other smaller tenants.
When an internet ending event happens, data centered could be physically destroyed, or there could be economic reasons that clients drop services, their data will probably get overwritten with a few waves of desperate clearance priced offers by the data centers, then data center employees will one day stop showing up to work. Each data center could have a different story. CEO went AWOL? Employees just stop showing up (layoffs? died? stayed home to conserve gas? stayed home to protect family from bandits?). Security contractors abandoned the data center and other clients to take up a contract with government’s last attempt to keep things under control? Decided to become a billionaire’s armed militia?
As for personal computers, windows 10 encrypts user drives by default. Unless you’re lucky and guess a bad password, only pre-2015 windows computers will be widely unencrypted. You might not be able to figure out how to login to that computer, but you’ll be able to see some files with a linux liveCD/liveUSB.
I have no idea what percent of hobbyist linux desktop/laptop installs will be unencrypted.
While I agree with everything else, I setup a fresh win10 install yesterday and it didn’t encrypt anything automatically (although the installer might have been old enough, I made the usb stick a couple years ago)
this what MS says:
power users hate making non-local accounts, but also IDK how many regular users have “supported” devices.
I had to login with an MS account before I could finish the install and create a local account, but I noticed I had the option to secure drives with bitlocker in the right click menu, I guess the registration process bypassed the automatic encryption