Indeed. I have family books from the 1800s and photo albums from the early 1900s. Zero effort was put into preserving these, they were just left on a shelf, occasionally moving from generation to generation.

Except for the most obsessive & technically skilled archivists, nobody will have any photos/documents from today in 100-150 years.

Fireproof safe's, aren't. A thief could steal it out of your house, you can't access it on the go, it'll get water damaged and mold and rot. The ink will fade. You won't have a drive to read the floppy disk/CD-rom/DVD/USB-A flash drive. Cloud and digital isn't the be all and end all, but there are plenty of problems with paper.

> you can't access it on the go

You can to the same extent that you can access a smart phone on the go. You just have to remember to bring it with you. Given how often I "forget" my smart phone at home, the "access anywhere" isn't a huge selling feature for most things to me. While I do use web-based email, I tend to prefer things like paper tickets for events and paper receipts because I actually find them to be more convenient than digital. This is because having to have a smart phone with me at all times that could get lost, stolen, damaged, malfunction etc. and is a single point of failure in the event thereof is the polar opposite of my definition of convenience.

No one has made the argument that paper is without problems. Only that it has way fewer problems than digital. That, and that the businesses and shills that are trying to force digital-everything are evil monsters that belong in the same rung of hell typically reserved for murderers and people who talk at movie theatres.

That seems like a personal problem.

Eventually, but all those are likely less likely than the electronic degradation. That said, keeping paper organized is hard.

And yet for thousands of years we managed just fine with paper & ink.

Engraving things in [hard] stone is the winning technology. When we chose to use anything less the information cant be very important.

Mold is a failure mode for floppy disks and water is a failure mode for many electronic storage media or the tools we use to read them.

I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way. We don't know whether that dusty floppy disk or CD-R is readable since we disposed of our last computer with a drive, or we associate the failure of a flash drive with a cheap drive rather than the intrinsic properties of the media, or we attribute it to abuse. We rarely have the opportunity to use something until it is worn out, or pick it up after a quarter century in storage.

Modern media is incredibly fragile. The chief advantage it has (in terms of longevity) is its digital nature, in our ability to reproduce it exactly. Yet that is only an advantage if we actively maintain our archives.

One unexpected issue with digital media is changing manufacturing quality and an inability to identify it until it is to late. Early stage floppy disks and CDs actually were pretty reliable but by the tail end so much cost saving had happened in manufacturing they'd turned to crap.

The same thing has happened with flash drives already, how do you identify a good flash drive? If you aren't careful you'll end up with a counterfeit but even the genuine articles have shaky reputations and manufacturers change the internal parts all the time.

I definitely agree with the difficulty in identifying reliable products, and it is made even more difficult due to marketing (e.g. conflating the "quality materials" of the shell with the overall reliability of the product).

That said, such things did happen in the past. Paper is the classic example since the manufacturing process affected its longevity, yet many other materials are graded based upon their properties.

> I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way.

Or probably because paper or other media has already stood the trial of time, there are some papyrus dating around 2500BC that’s more than 4000 years ago, now think if any of the tools needed for current media will be available 4000 years from now.

Modern paper will disintegrate over time, something with acid.

And no need for it. I don't think I have any books printed in the first half of the 20th century with yellowing pages. That's not the case with certain publishers in the recent past who, I guess, have gone for cheap printing options.

Most printer-paper you can buy in a shop is acid-free. I still have high-school printouts from 20 years ago that show no signs of degradation. I don't think any of my own digital assets have survived from 2003 — granted I was a teenager at the time, so I did not engage in the greatest archival practices. But see the comment above: all you need to preserve paper is to make sure it doesn't get damaged, and simply eyeballing it will confirm whether or not it has.

I think this depends on lifestyle. I know that if there's vital information on a piece of paper I need to photograph it (or type it up) and email it to myself because the paper will be lost/destroyed before too long. I could invest in a fireproof safe but it'd be another thing to move and take up space which I don't have a huge amount of. Something emailed to multiple email providers and copies stored in Dropbox, etc is unlikely to lost.

And when you're dealing with a high quantity of information, good luck searching through thousands of sheets of paper for something.