Nice topic Steve,

I totally agree with your worries as same applies to me & everyone here.

I think this as negative effect of evolution. As other user mentioned, same thing has happened to music also.

It does not matter if you have made copies of your digital data on Hard disk, CD ROM or DVD. Because sooner or later, they are going to vanish (Just like TAPE drive). Another problem is tools to use that digital data. What if you have saved all images in JPEG format and music in MP3 format and that formats are extinct for your grandchild ?

In big picture, this problem is not only for digital data. It is very big. What if we have preserved all books in ENGLISH today, but ENGLISH itself might gets extinct after couple of decades. I remember that same problem raised when USA government had to bury their radio active waste.

Really mankind has to do more efforts in this way at earliest. Meanwhile, we can only try and hope for best.

For my personal digital data, twice a year, i recall all my old data and backup them and current data to latest available media (Currently DVD or Blue Ray). I know, i have to do this again and again and data is going to grow exponentially. But there is no alternative i can see around. This is very difficult for companies having TB's of data.

Thanks for reading,