Wasing is, Wasing not

Also, previous tag:

fun fact this is a big issue that museums/archives/preservation professionals run into

This is something I bring up a lot. Digital preservation is not a thing to rely on. Anything digital is inherently ephemeral, fleeting.

All current and former digital storage will eventually fail. Paper tapes and punch cards cards wear and rot. Magnetic tape and disks grow mold and shed their magnetic coating. Hard drives seize and crash, their controllers fail. Optical media scratches, rots, or simply fades. Solid state media loses its charge over time. Cloud services shut down with no warning.

Long-term digital storage is a never-ending process of copying to new media.

And then there's the problem of format.

It took less than 30 years for digital works by Andy Worhol — one of the most popular artists of the 20th century — to be lost to obsolete technology.

We had the disks, we had the computers, we had modern emulators for the computers. But reading the images (PDF Archive) required very specific combinations of operating system and software versions, and in some cases required reverse-engineering image formats for which the correct combination of software could not be found.

This wasn't some obscure machine. Millions of Amiga computers were sold, and Amiga users are among the most dedicated to keeping the platform going long after its discontinuation.

And still the image format had to be reverse-engineered to recover Worhol's images.

How much of our culture from the past 30 years has been entirely digital?