I believe that imperfect (lossy) storage mediums are not only acceptable, but desirable both on a personal and a social level.

On a personal level, perfect memory is more often a curse than a boon: Humans have a tendency to remember negative stuff more, thus perfect memory is used to replay the worst and most hurtful past memories. Forgetting in this context is an act of healing, and allows a person to live a happier, more present life.

On a social level, perfect social memory creates a bias for past ways of thinking, reducing the space for new ideas to evolve and take hold. It is not accidental that the societies most obsessed with the past are deeply conservative ones, which often need to purposefully destroy a lot of knowledge that does not agree with their worldview. On the other hand, we do not need a detailed record of the battles of every low level nazi tank commander.

Loss and rebuilding of knowledge is as important to science as it is to an individual, and we have a great parallel to it in nature: Mutation rates, the cornerstone of evolution. The mutation rate of human mitochondrial DNA as per this paper clocks in at 0.00003 (3x10^-5) per base per 20 year generation.

How does this stack up against current storage media? Well, many of the commercially available solutions have an expected lifespan far below that 20 year period. For example, SSDs typically have 5 year expected lifecycle and HDDs marginally better at up to 10. But as per this paper they both have Uncorrectable Bit Error Rates (UBER) approximating 10^-15, which is about ten billion times less than human mutations. Now, one could argue that DNA is closer to code than data, but there are various media codecs (such as JPG) which are actually code as well.

I’m not advocating for increasing the heat in datacenters, or exposing SSDs to direct sunlight in order to trigger more bit flips. But I am saying that we have replicated the concept of memory in the digital world, but we have mostly failed to replicate the concept of forgetting. Even the legislation for “right to forget” was more than 2 decades behind the rise of the World Wide Web. I do sometimes go over past data and let things go. I believe others should too, and that our systems should better account for that.