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When a U.S. president left office 40 years ago, archival teams swept in to gather almost every piece of paper, picture, audio or video tape that the president and his staff had generated.Â
They carried boxes of these official documents from the White House to the National Archives and Records Administration, which stores and makes them accessible to the public in perpetuity.
By the late 2000s, as more of those records came in electronic form, workers swapped out boxes for giant servers, loaded them onto trucks and drove them to their new quarters when the presidency turned over. The records were transferred onto servers in a NARA data center.