> what about when the last optical drive is manufactured? [...] There are two types of digital archiving. One, which you're describing in this line of reasonin

> what about when the last optical drive is manufactured? [...] There are two types of digital archiving. One, which you're describing in this line of reasoning, is keeping a digital storage device in cold storage, booting up later, and trying to read the data. I agree that this has significant issues, as digital devices are physical devices, in addition to being digital ones, and not necessarily that reliable at that. There is also digital archiving in the sense of understanding what the bits represent. I would argue that this sense of the phrase is actually more compelling, because fundamentally digital data is just a bag of bits. While this would be more effort than I'd go to personally, I'd expect any competent digital archivist to store their data in a ZFS-based disk array, SAN, or cloud service like S3, or ideally multiple of the above. (Or futures equivalents of these techniques.) Yes, any given service, technology, or device may come and go. But this is missing the point. The way you achieve continuity is by periodically refreshing the storage so that at any given point in time the data is stored in a modern (for the time) storage device. There are still important issues to be solved, but the important ones are no longer questions of maintain physical devices, which is key. (E.g. the codec problem.) The main situation in which this approach does not work out is if you're trying to do archeological-type recovery of a digital storage device that has not been actively maintained. Then you're back in scenario #1. But if we're asking about a situation where someone actively cares about preserving their own data, the situation is not nearly as bad as these arguments make out.