… Properly-stored film prints have a certain physical resilience to them, while digital tapes and hard drives are relatively fragile by comparison. Rapidly evolving file formats and DRM also carry the risk of leaving one decade’s digital archive unreadable by the next, potentially putting future film historians in the same position as someone trying to rescue a school paper written in a long-abandoned word processor.
File conversion and corruption threaten our digital media like corrosion and mildew threatened our old film reels and tapes. I guess not even bits and bytes are immune to aging.