Luckily that’s mostly no more a problem if your data is already on modern storage media. HDDs are cheap, making backups is easy and slowly but surly that notion

Luckily that’s mostly no more a problem if your data is already on modern storage media. HDDs are cheap, making backups is easy and slowly but surly that notion that backups are necessary is entering the collective consciousness. Data now just moves from HDD to HDD and is usually (or should at least be) on at least two HDDs (or one HDD and one SSD) at once, one of which is replaced as it breaks. I’m not terribly worried about the expiration date of HDDs, it doesn’t really matter that they are only the temporary home of your data for a few years. One interesting problem where the short lifetime of HDDs comes into play is how you should pass something on, for example to your kids or grandkids. It’s not their data, they probably don’t care enough (or don’t pay enough attention) to make sure to always migrate it to current storage media. Sure, they might enjoy looking at old photos and videos but how often will they do that? Every five years? Every decade? Just stowing away a HDD in the attic is probably not a great idea. Using contemporary storage media that might survive longer is also questionable. Will it be easily possible to read CDs and DVDs in forty years? I’m actually more worried about that than about file formats. I’m willing to bet that it will be possible to open up JPEGs with PCs (whatever they may be) in forty years. Even by default, even without getting any extra software. TIF is now 25 years old, it was never really widely used (at least compared to JPEG) but it’s still easy to open up TIF files. (Forget opening the raw files from your DSLR, though.)