The idea of that I'm playing with for the novel is that in a post-apocalyptic future, since a lot of governments have collapsed but there still needs to be something that can be exchanged for goods and services, people use data as currency, the same way that silk was used on the silk road in medieval times. It can be easily transported and can be easily proportioned in denominations. You would even have "banks" that would store large amounts of data in one location. (One of the things I'm unsure about is how "up" the internet would be in the scenario I want to paint, but assume that it's not at its current level of functionality)
The problem would then be that there is a rush to use all this memory as currency, which would lead to lots of important stuff being erased.
My idea is that the hero of the story would be a "data archaeologist" whose goal would be to save important corpuses of information before they get deleted for monetary purposes, trying to find either data centers with unexplored servers or data hoarders like yourselves who have preserved information.
What would it help me to know about the involved technology in order to write this? I'm not that much of a tech guy, I just think the idea of memory and knowledge in competition with commerce is an interesting one to explore, and y'all seem like the people to ask to help me with making this work realistically.