Archiving digital media
I think it’s a mistake to think of film in general the same way as a paper book (probably the most rugged mass medium invented so far). It only lasts for a century if you store it in a controlled environment—and that costs money to maintain; it’s really only the very few reels our society values enough to put in the “ark” that can outlast one human lifetime.
In 2001 I got to visit a giant film vault underneath Pittsburgh—the negative for “Star Wars” used to live there for a time…even back then, they’d long ago transitioned to renting generic climate-controlled storage space, because there wasn’t enough film business anymore. It impressed on me how unlikely it is that the average indie filmmaker will ever have the resources to preserve their own work on its original medium…and in fact, the only reason we have any of the oldest, highly-unstable (and flammable) early films is that somebody had the foresight to transfer the reels to a more mature technology: really long strips of photo paper.
It’s true that film used to be able to score one important point against magnetic media—tapes and hard drives decay at a fixed rate, thanks to the Earth’s magnetic field, and basically _can’t_ be preserved. Optical discs don’t have that built-in death clock—but they depend on a delicate sandwich of metal or dye and cheap plastic maintaining its same optical properties over decades…so it’s just a pick-your-poison situation; instead of steady, gradual corruption of your whole collection, every so often one item out of it will be randomly rendered totally useless.
My understanding is that solid-state media are the current best bet for a medium that can survive for decades in normal room-temperature conditions—they’re a grid of chemical cells that are flipped one way when you put electricity into them, and another way when you take electricity out, making a pattern of ones and zeroes. The genius of them, supposedly, is that when the medium fails it becomes read-only: that is, you don’t lose data when your SSD hardware breaks down. (We’ve all lost data off solid-state USB sticks and SD cards, which would seem to contradict that—but usuallly that’s due to software corruption, a problem with the particular disk format, FAT32, that they come with out of the box. Remember in the early ’00s, when Firewire drives would sometimes spontaneously erase themselves? Same disk format.)
But the relative toughness of SSDs is still just conjecture…in the meantime, I think multiple copies of lossless digital files are the only long-term option for people who don’t have access to a film vault. I used to keep bare hard drives in a safe-deposit box, but that was a pain to maintain (and also a waste of a perfectly good large hard drive’s limited lifespan). Now I have a RAID drive at home that gets backed up to Backblaze ($5/month; there are cheaper alternatives if you don’t need the auto-backup feature), and I give my CC-licensed video masters to Archive.org. If I could bet on anybody’s preservation efforts in the short term, I’d bet on those guys.
For the long term, I hear Hitachi is working on quartz-crystal digital storage…
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