Where the Archive Stands
Where We Are Today
The archive holds a number of records that would be unimpressive to state and is not the useful measure anyway.
The useful measures are these: every number ever issued still resolves; no record has been edited after issue, only appended to; and the physical archive is complete for every run, including the ones that failed.
Against the standard set at the beginning — that the record should survive the company — the honest assessment is partial. The physical layer would survive. The document layer would survive. The digital layer would not, and no amount of describing it as a mirror changes the fact that it is the layer everyone actually uses.
Looking Ahead
The next problem is custody, and it is not a technical one.
A record that outlives the company needs somebody to hold it who is not the company. That means an arrangement with an institution, or a trust, or something else with a longer expected life than a business — and every option carries obligations that would constrain decisions now, in exchange for a benefit that arrives after everyone involved has stopped caring.
It is exactly the kind of thing that gets postponed indefinitely by reasonable people.
What We Hope To Build
The intention is to make the digital layer genuinely optional rather than nominally optional.
Today it is described as a convenience copy and functions as the primary interface. Closing that gap means the physical document has to carry enough to stand alone, which means it has to carry more, which conflicts with keeping it a document rather than a file.
That tension is unresolved and is stated here because it will be obvious later that it was known now.
Challenges
The largest is that none of this is urgent.
Nothing breaks this year if custody is not arranged. Nothing breaks next year either. The failure mode of a durability problem is that it stays invisible until the moment it is unrecoverable, and by then the people who could have acted have moved on.
The second challenge is scale. Every commitment made here becomes heavier as the number of records grows, and the cheapest moment to make a hard commitment is always the current one.