It's 100% true for a book forgotten on your attic, but if discussing organized effort to preserve information I argue it's an illusion - the libraries have to b

It's 100% true for a book forgotten on your attic, but if discussing organized effort to preserve information I argue it's an illusion - the libraries have to be actively looked after too. There is a fire protection, regular deratization and disinsection, if roof starts leaking it has to be fixed. If you just leave a book in the middle of a field unprotected it won't last a year. When libraries are left without funds their books get destroyed fairly quickly, I've seen that first hand in my home country. Digital data requires some maintenance, but with cloud services that's offloaded to service providers. I haven't logged in into Glacier or the related AWS account in years, and yet it still backups my hdd regularly. Now, if a comet strikes the Earth and destroys all the civilization, yes, paper books will be a lot more useful than HDDs or dead cloud servers, but in more realistic scenarios data copies give you more flexibility. Just look at Ukraine, they moved all their official digital archives out of the country at the very beginning of the war. You couldn't ever pull it off with paper archives, it would take months and cost a fortune.