It's not a matter of incompetence, it's a matter of being very, very cheap. Artistic endeavors are a unique blend of "extremely chaotic workflows nobody bother

It's not a matter of incompetence, it's a matter of being very, very cheap. Artistic endeavors are a unique blend of "extremely chaotic workflows nobody bothers to remember the moment the work is 'done'", "90% of our output doesn't recoup costs so we don't want to burn cash on data storage", and "that one thing you made 20 years ago is now an indie darling and we want to remaster it". A lot of creatives and publishers were sold on the promise of digital 30-odd years ago. They recorded their masters - their "source code" - onto formats they believed would be still in use today. Then they paid Iron Mountain to store that media. Iron Mountain is a safe deposit box on steroids, they use underground vaults to store physical media. You store media in Iron Mountain if you want that specific media to remain safe in any circumstance[0], but that's a strategy that doesn't make sense for electronic media. There is no electronic format that is shelf-stable and guaranteed to be economically readable 30 years out. What you already know works is periodic remigration and verification[1], but that's an active measure that costs money to do. Publishers don't want to pay that cost, it breaks their business model, 90% of what they make will never be profitable. So now they're paying Iron Mountain even more for data recovery on the small fraction of data they care about. The key thing to remember is that they don't know what they need to recover at the time the data is being stored. If they did, publishers wouldn't be spending money on risky projects, they'd have a scientific formula to create a perfect movie or album or TV show that would recoup costs all the time. [0] The original sales pitch being that these vaults were nuke-proof. [1] Your cloud provider does this automatically and that's built into the monthly fees you would pay. People who are DIYing their storage setup and using BTRFS or ZFS are using filesystems that automate that for online disks, but you still pay for keeping the disks online.