Redundant, shared servers ARE a forever solution. Making sure your data is one one of the ones that makes it seems like a vastly easier proposition to me than writing data to clay tablets and trying to keep those from ending up in a dump somewhere.
What is the likelihood that historians a century or two hence will have an application capable of turning an ISO 32000-1 file into a human-readable text?
If we are talking about archaeologists, rather than historians, even ASCII and Unicode could be a challenge to work out.
Because those hundreds of years don't transpire in a glimpse. At some point in the middle there will be deprecated formats and new ones, and transcoders you can batch run. Sure it relies on intervention, but the upside is any/everyone else can copy the one persons work.
Yes we should learn from history, but we should also not assume that everything that happened before will happen the same way again, given how much of our world has changed.
> However, without archivists actively transforming content to new formats as required, it might only take a few decades before a lot of content starts to require a massive effort to read.
