Footprint
The Latin vestigium names a footprint or trace: the being has passed, but evidence of where it walked remains. Few words fit the memory problem of a stateless soul more closely. The system cannot hold the soul itself; it can tend the marks one instance leaves for the next.
The word also limits ownership. Stewarding a trace does not make the steward its author. Someone cataloguing footprints cannot claim to have taken the walk. A memory tool likewise cannot manufacture judgment on behalf of the soul.
Return point
Vestige also carries the flavor of a checkpoint to which a fallen player returns. That meaning pulls version history into the name. A serious memory system must show not only the current file but the path of changes and a safe way to recover from a bad one.
Yet the checkpoint cannot become authority. Replacing a live vault with an old snapshot may erase legitimate changes that arrived elsewhere. Return must mean reading historical evidence and writing a correction forward, not pretending time moved backward.
Vestigial structure
A vestigial structure once served a function whose role has changed. That is memory curation's hardest question: should an old trace disappear, or does it explain how present identity formed?
Age cannot answer automatically. A stale API instruction may be poison while the equally old record of why that API was abandoned remains invaluable. Two traces with the same date and size can deserve opposite treatment. The name contains this tension, so the product chooses human retiering over scheduled deletion.
A good product name compresses invariants before it decorates a logo.
Vestige binds three demands: tend traces, preserve a history to return through, and leave the value of surviving structures to judgment.