[nitrogen]

Yes, you're missing the hindsight bias. People using punch cards and laserdiscs weren't warned ahead of time that things stored on them would become unretrievable soon after. Nobody knows in advance which formats/media will be "obsoleted consciously".

[carboncopy]

The overlap between punch cards and other formats was decades.

"During the 1960s, the punched card was gradually replaced as the primary means for data storage by magnetic tape, as better, more capable computers became available. ... [P]unched cards were still commonly used for data entry and programming until the mid-1980s when the combination of lower cost magnetic disk storage ... made punched cards obsolete ..."[1]

Yes, I listed wikipedia as a primary source, deal with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

[clock_tower]

And remember, punch cards and laserdiscs are famous obsolete storage formats. What if you put your important information on an Iomega Jaz cassette, or stored it in a Bernoulli Box cartridge?