A 250-year-old library at Amsterdam's Royal Tropical Institute gets shredded for budget cuts, its 400,000 books and 20,000 magazines saved at the last minute by Ismail Serageldin, director of the modern Library of Alexandria, who is rebuilding that institution as a digital knowledge hub. The film treats this as one symptom of a wider problem: hard drives fail within five years, floppy disks are unreadable, and nobody agreed on what to keep. In San Francisco, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle explains why his organization scans and stores the entire web every two months. Retired NASA engineer Dennis Wingo works out of an abandoned McDonald's on a former Silicon Valley army base, rebuilding a tape machine to recover the first images ever taken of the moon. Archivist Jason Scott's volunteer network races to copy websites before they vanish. At the Long Now Foundation, Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, and Danny Hillis build a clock designed to tick for ten thousand years, a physical argument against short-term thinking about what survives.