Laudable idea, but there's just so much variety of old platforms, file formats, and backup formats. It's hard to guess what might be highest priority. Maybe "Universal" just sounds a little strong to me.
Just covering every popular RISC/Unix platform would be daunting. Ever hear of Pyramid Osx? It was once popular. That's skipping over mainframes (not just IBM either, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BUNCH), mid-range (os/400, mpe, VMS, Tandem), OS/2, BeOS, embedded platforms, and much, much, more.
There have been some efforts in the past to take care of at least one of the problems that you enumerate. PRONOM [1], GDFR [2], and UDFR [3] sought (and still strive in the case of PRONOM) to be more formalized versions of the /etc/magic file, so that digital formats could be more readily classified automatically.
Unfortunately UDFR and GDFR have fizzled out (a theme that occurs sometwhat often when projects have high ambitions and inadequate support). PRONOM is still around, but has difficulty adding in accurate information since the overlap between the technologists with the domain expertise necessary for such a database to succeed and librarians is quite small. It would benefit quite greatly from an infusion of engineers who wouldn't mind filling out forms with corrections. :)
Just covering every popular RISC/Unix platform would be daunting. Ever hear of Pyramid Osx? It was once popular. That's skipping over mainframes (not just IBM either, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BUNCH), mid-range (os/400, mpe, VMS, Tandem), OS/2, BeOS, embedded platforms, and much, much, more.