My experience with trying to preserve various kinds of digital data over the last 20 years or so is that the problem is almost always the obsolescence of the player, or the interface between the player and the output device, rather than the longevity of the medium. First there were floppies, then tape, then Syquest drives, then CD's, now DVD's and terabyte hard drives, probably some kind of solid-state memory is next, who knows?
We'll have to keep herding the bits from one medium to another as long as long as technology keeps changing, which means forever, and if you screw up and forget to transfer something it will wind up sitting on your shelf, perfectly intact, with no place to go.
We'll have to keep herding the bits from one medium to another as long as long as technology keeps changing, which means forever, and if you screw up and forget to transfer something it will wind up sitting on your shelf, perfectly intact, with no place to go.