[dustycowboy]

No, digital preservation is much harder than most people think. Digital media degrade too. Hard disks, optical media and magnetic tape all degrade over time.

Paper and film are fairly durable. They can be preserved without any maintenance for quite a long time.

Format obsolescence means that it can be hard to read old files. Sometimes, you need to track down a precise version of a program. The more tricky issue is that sometimes a file can render, but incorrectly on more modern versions.

Also, digital files require specialized software to read, whereas paper documents are immediately readable. Film is also readable to a certain extent without equipment.

Digital files might be deemed useless at some point in the future and dumped in the trash. Or there might not be enough money to transfer the files to a new medium.

[evgen]

In this case we are not talking about paper or film, but old analog video and audio tape. This is reel-to-reel audio and quad or u-matic analog video tape. It suffers from even more degradation issues than digital files as you need to maintain the original medium, have no error correction layers, and are faced with an increasing rarity of the specialized equipment needed to read the data. There is also no additional data that advanced techniques will be able to pull from the original low-fidelity source.

[pbhjpbhj]

Digital files can be duplicated, hashed, have redundancy logically built in.

Analogue files render incorrectly too; surfaces deteriorate - media rots, oxidises, decays.

I've got digital files from last millennium that have survived better than analogue ones - both written text and images. For the most important I've kept logical and physical redundancy (but not yet needed it); much harder to do with bulky physical media.

Libraries in my UK city, and across the UK, have been closed rapidly in the last few years - the materials are generally dumped/sold, but the data from all of them could be held in a small box (computer) with multiple redundant backups for the cost of a couple of magazine subscriptions. For one librarians wage this could all be easily shared with the entire web.

We, or at least I, am keen to hang on to some artefacts. But a lot of what we keep seems to be primarily useful for navel gazing.