On 2006-07-27, Jose wrote:
Every electronic or optical medium developed thus far deteriorates with age at a much faster rate than does paper.

... and the most important "aging" effects is from the software. I have
plenty of documents I can no longer read because the software is
incompatible with today's versions, and the old software is incompatible
with today's hardware, and the old hardware no longer works.

If the documents are underneat not encrypted, and not in any weird
character set, it is possible to recover them without too much
difficulty (although the formatting will be gone).

I suspect non-proprietary formats though (such as jpg or png for images)
will have a much longer shelf life than proprietary document formats.

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