How to Preserve Civilizations in Virtual Reality

One method of preserving civilizations that's most effective is to digitally upload their brains into computers. When you're not in a tank when you're actually a hard drive or an uploaded person or they are good enough brain control anyway you can't ever find out that you're in the matrix. The only thing I could think of would be if we've been placed in one for the purpose of trying to repair us to consciously come to the realization we're not necessarily in a real one. Stephen Hawking says these things still gonna be true so well eventually something like black hole farming will happen.