>Your house burns down, now what? Nothing stops you from having redundancy in printed media. In fact, I have that photo reproduced in another album of my relat

>Your house burns down, now what? Nothing stops you from having redundancy in printed media. In fact, I have that photo reproduced in another album of my relatives. >That's because digital storage didn't exist then... What can you realistically do to keep the digital photo through 120 years or more? Imagine you stored it on the most durable media you have, M-Disc perhaps, or whatever they advertise today. Let's assume it even survived 120 years with its data intact. Are you sure your descendants will have the means to read that M-Disc in the year 2140? How about the file system on it? JPEG or DNG format? With a printed photo, you don't have to be sure. Online storage is much more complex and thus inherently volatile. You depend on other people and on the assumption that business and legal frameworks will remain the same throughout the archival period. Digital tech heavily depends on an unbroken chain of content transfer, which is a pretty big assumption for archival-grade storage, considering that companies, encodings and formats come and go, and there are also things like censorship and AI "enhancement" to worry about. (and who knows what else it will be many years into future) Digital media is not static by nature. Admittedly, any media depends on content refreshing, but the traditional media has much longer life between transfers - for an extreme example we still can read Sumerian clay tablets. >Now it's easier and cheaper to store media than ever before Storage cost was never a problem. The problem is the separation of the archival-worthy content from the info noise. Now, when the noise is multiplied, selecting is much harder than before. For my case, I only have a few photos worthy of putting into a 120-year photo album for my descendants, because I'm just an ordinary person.