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jb, I said "storage medium" in my link message, so I do mean the physical media, in addition to the data itself.
Even only considering the medium, did you ever have to transfer files from thousands of floppy disks to CD's? I did. The days of 1.44 MB floppies coincided in my family with photo files that just about filled one floppy per image. That effort was considerable, and none of my current PC's even has a floppy drive of any sort. When I later went from CD's to DVD's the effort was much less, but still an effort.
I also do not agree with your assertion that any widely used digital format will remain legible. I face this problem at work, where formerly VERY-popular-format CAD data off Sun and other Linux workstations (e.g. Microstation, Anvil) is barely translatable into our current formats (Pro-E and AutoCAD). Each translation requires manual error checking. It is easy enough for me to imagine document formats becoming so disused that a similar circumstance will arise. I had to make a related choice in scanning our older hand-drawn documents (our products and equipment goes back over 60 years), a project taking a full-time employee over two years. Right now I'm scanning those into PDF format (really just an envelope around TIFF data) but we may need to be nimble in the future to format-shift those as needed.
Time will tell which of us is correct but I suggest being diligent in preserving digital data, which has an unproven (and partly negative) track record versus the printed word.
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