The Library of Alexandria was one of the most famous examples of knowledge databases of the ancient world. They manage to collect an immense body of information which they categorized and filed away for future records.
A large amount of information eventually became lost to us after a series of fires which occurred at different periods of history (contrary to popular belief there was more than one fire). Many portions of the records weren't restored and have been lost to history as a result.
My question:
Is it possible that copies of the records might still exist in other areas of the former empire? Possible in a forgotten backlog somewhere in the ancient world?
Was there any known system of making copies of these sorts of records which would give historians hope that something along those lines might exist? Some sort of example which shows "We know they made copies of these records here so it's possible they made copies of the others that were lost"
If such records might exist, where would they even be?
There is a large private library at Herculaneum, one of the towns destroyed by the Vesuvius eruption. It contains a large quantity of blackened scrolls which have been difficult to impossible to open or read, but recently, some modern technology is making it possible to read the scrolls with X-Rays. It will take a while, but who knows what might be discovered there?