I found this report from NIST that estimates tape to last 20 years, CD-R and DVD-R 30 years, and M-DISC 100 years 🤷 (I didn’t even know optical was used professionally, and found the term “optical jukebox” to be hilarious :)

https://www.nist.gov/publications/digital-evidence-preservation-considerations-evidence-handlers

But more importantly, an actively maintained storage system will last forever (as long as maintained). And for example AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs just $0.00099 / GB / month*, so you can store terabytes for the price of a cup of coffee.

*Plus extra fees for access and stuff, but the point is managed storage isn’t particularly expensive unless you have very large amounts of data or heavy usage.

What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?

I think that as storage density goes up and price goes down, what used to be cumbersome and expensive amounts of data become easily manageable. So the only reasons we loose data will be business or political. Which will also decrease as there’s now money in buying failing platforms.

But yeah, I’m also happy none of the social media I created when I was young still exists, and the platforms are buried by the sands of time. Having everything you do on the internet stay around forever feels like a nightmare.