Pretty much. You see hobbyists getting data off of 30+ year old hard drives for the novelty of it, but I can’t imagine relying on that as a preservation copy. Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc. Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect.
Sometimes they fail for other reasons as well, such as improper storage.
Back in the 90's to 00's a friend had a collection of cd's that he'd written, but he stored them in a big sleeved folder container. The container itself caused them to warp slightly, which made them unusable.
I took a few for testing and managed to unbend them after some time, which turned them back into a working state.
[Note: That's the most apostrophes I've ever used in a sentence, it feels dirty]
Yeah I didn't want to use heat in case that did more damage, so I just used some weights I had lying around.
If I remember right I just stacked a few starting on the floor with a protective layer in-between so as to not scratch them (a piece of paper is fine). Then add a 5kg or whatever weight on top. After a few days I turned them over and did the same again.
After that most were flat, only one or two needed some more individual time. I imagine that if after that if they're still not flat them maybe heating them slightly in the oven or even just the sun outside might do the trick.
I have been working in long term storage for many years. I never understood why we cant just 3d-print binary code on thin clay tablets and then burn them for long term storage. Clay tablets are readable for thousands of years.
Stone - and more usefully, clay - last almost forever, but they're impractical for digital storage, since there's no useful way of imprinting on them that isn't very low density, unlike paper.
Unless we could improvise something with old-school dot matrix impact heads to print on clay - I wonder if anyone has tried.
1 line of 80col text per card is pretty awful though, and then you bring back all the horrors of 60s card sequencing but for bigger files.
Some kind of 'barcode' encoding, with heavy error correction, would probably be better. I've seen attempts that claim 500kB per side using a largely unmodified QR code system, but I suspect better could be achieved - the method of scanning is probably going to be the bottleneck anyway.
