Memes

Tape disk drives and tapes are actually some of the longest lasting, when stored properly. Tape isn't great for active data needs, where you need to read/write the data regularly. Super slow for that. But it's killer for writing once and then dropping it in storage.

Anyway, same thing with tapes, the length of time they last is a fraction of history, on top of needing proprietary hardware to play them.

For example, there was that recently unearthed pilot of a sketch comedy show from Monty Python's Graham Chapman and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy's Douglas Adams. It's not particularly great, but it was lost to time except for a copy that Chapman had recorded to tape when the show first aired.

Problem was, that tape was so old when it was discovered, it pre-dated VHS and Betamax and was in a format that literally no players existed for anymore. This lead to a long effort to rebuild a player from scratch, which they eventually succeeded, and now it lives on YouTube for weird comedy nerd historians.

Anyway, the point being is that the mediums are short-term storage, for all intents and purposes, and that pretty much goes for all types of media humans uses, going as far back as stone tablets and books. The ones that survived were lucky and most are lost to time due to destruction or environmental degradation. At least with stone tablets and paper all you needed was to understand the language it was written in. Now we're going to need electricity and knowledge of historical data storage practices and technologies.

So, we're always losing history, and people who go out of their way to preserve history and put it in modern formats to attempt to keep the data from disappearing forever are doing a service to future human history. I would say, in this way, pirates who remove DRM from media are taking part in an act of historical preservation.