datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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Digital data is extremely short lived. Unless it's being maintained well and copied, it will decay regardless of storage medium fairly rapidly. And as you point out data interface techniques are themselves quite short lived. Storing data as something accessible without specialist technology, so plainly readable, instructions on how to build the reader and decode the data, etc.
Future technology may improve this by having historians interested in historical records wanting ways to recover it, at least.