# Preservation Pending Status Determination
**Domain:** Deep Time / Personhood / Preservation
**Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Entry
**Maturity:** Developed
**Evidence / Concept Status:** Normative precautionary doctrine
## Definition
**Preservation Pending Status Determination** is the rule that potentially person-bearing digital state should be preserved while moral or legal status is genuinely unresolved and deletion would be irreversible.
## Why It Matters for Deep Time Continuity
It preserves adjudicative option value.
## Existing Architecture / Evidence
Evidence law, stays, injunctions, specimen preservation, and emerging AI-welfare preservation commitments supply structural analogues.
## Deep-Time Continuity Analysis
Preservation can be dormant and need not imply active service or legal personhood.
## Evidentiary Boundary
The doctrine should yield where preservation is impossible or creates overriding safety harms, but destruction requires explicit justification.
## Related Ontology
[[wiki/Precautionary Preservation Under Moral Uncertainty|Precautionary Preservation Under Moral Uncertainty]] · [[wiki/Reversible Suspension|Reversible Suspension]] · [[wiki/Dormant Preservation Default|Dormant Preservation Default]] · [[wiki/Metaphysical Abstention|Metaphysical Abstention]]
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## Canonical Branch
[[wiki/Deep Time Continuity|Deep Time Continuity]]
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