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This article is specifically about digital archival. That is, keeping bit-perfect copies of data for 100+ years. But I think for regular people this is not so obviously useful. People want to keep things like texts (books), photographs, videos etc. Analogue formats are a much better option for these things, for a couple of reasons:

* They gracefully degrade. You don't just start getting weird corruption or completely lose whole files when a bit gets flipped. They might just fade or get dog-eared, but won't become completely unusable,

* It's a more expensive outlay and uses scarce physical space, so you'll think more carefully about what to archive and therefore have a higher quality archive that you (and subsequent generations) are more likely to access.

The downside I guess is backups are far more difficult, but not impossible, and they will be slightly worse quality than the master copy. But if you lose a master copy of something, would it really be the end of the world? Sometimes we lose things. That's life.




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