I tried posting the following reply on the website the original article appeared on, but their comment system kept having an error so I'll post it here and expand upon what I would have said.
There is nothing new here; the problems of electronic data deteriorating or becoming unreadable because of proprietary lock in of various closed-source applications is well-known going back more than 20 years that I'm aware of, and certainly a lot longer than that. The use of wire recorders, player piano rolls, 78-RPM records, phonorecords now, 8-track tapes, laserdiscs, 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies, Jazz discs, Zip discs, and now 3 1/2 inch floppies, (and lots of other media I know I've forgotten) are all now obsolete storage media, some of which may have data which can no-longer be retrieved because the hardware and/or software to read them is unavailable, lost or forgotten.
RMS on Digital PDP minicomputers running RSX and RSTS and VAX machines and OS . ISAM and PAM on Univac VS/9 OS on 90/60 /70 and /80. VSAM on IBM mainframes (except the few places continuing to run z-System). The Control Data Cyber systems and their data file formats. Gould, Goodyear, Harris and RCA mainframes. All of these are basically obsolete, most if not all are gone, and data stored on media from those systems, if developed by a proprietary application, is probably, for all intents and purposes, lost forever even if the data is still present. The media may have deteriorated, and the systems to read them are essentially nonexistent.
Mechanisms for regular conversion as technology changes have to be provided for. This, however, requires that as the older media ages, that there be budget and personnel available to provide the conversion while both old and new media types are available. As the case of NASA cited in the article (an employee scrounged equipment and tapes on her own in order to keep the data alive until a means to retrieve it could be found), sometimes either or both may not be available.
Libraries have mentioned how their resources are stretched thin as it is, they may not have the funds or trained personnel to export old data to new media. And at the rate media keep changing this is happening more and more frequently. 30 years ago is 1980, 250K 8" disks are still in use. The 5 1/4" 360K disc is popular because of MS DOS machines. 20 years ago is 1990, and then, the 5 1/4 was still and 3 1/2 inch floppies were becoming popular, 15 years ago a reasonable medium for high-capacity storage were 100-meg zip disks. Now I don't even have a 5 1/4" drive, my computer still has a 3 1/2 but I don't have any floppies or use them, because I have a 4 gb jump drive I wear on a lanyard around my neck, and cost ten bucks.
We've gone to digital storage because it's orders of magnitude cheaper than analog. I've pointed out in previous articles that with a digital camera and 4GB SD cards, I can take thousands of pictures at an effective cost per picture that effectively rounds to zero. A single photo might take 1/2 to 1 meg, which means, without changing media, I can take upwards of 3,500 photos. Net cost is $10 when the media is bought; nothing more unless I print an image. When I take pictures, I don't take one, I take 3, or 5, or 20 because the extra pictures are essentially free and I can delete the ones I don't want later. When I was using 35MM film, each photo, with film and developing, was about 30c. A couple hundred pictures would set you back over US$50. Today, for $50 I can take more than 20,000 images.
But my sister still has an older digital camera that uses Smartmedia, She has to be careful to copy her images to hard disc when she uses it because you basically can't buy smartmedia any more and even when you could, the maximum size was 128 meg. Her photos were in the 150K size range so she can still take more than 500 photos on a 64M chip, and also the cost is effectively zero.
And for current media it's still near-zero per image. I bought a 1 terabyte drive (1000^3, not 1024^3). On one trillion bytes I can store just a hair under 1 million 1 megabyte images. The drive cost about $110 including tax, so that means each image stored costs $0.0011, or 1/10 of one cent. Stored on 4 GB DVD that costs about 25c, 3500 images cost $0.000071 each to store. Unless printed out (which has also dropped, it's about 15c at a drug store, and the image printer can read the media directly), again, the cost of any image is basically so low as to be noise.
But there are trade-offs. Information is so much cheaper to store digitally that we have to rely on the systems being available to retrieve them. Photos can be viewed out of a shoebox in the middle of the Sahara desert as long as it's light or you have a candle or flashlight. But you'd better have a computer, a media reader if it's not on he computer's hard drive, and some software to view a digital image, or you'll never see it. Plus electric power for the computer, too.
Information having any value on non-machined media will be usable as long as human beings are around; machine-processed media is only good as long as the machines that process that media are around. Paper photos will decay to some extent, they'll still remain as photos without human intervention. While digital data will never decay as long as the media is intact, the ability to continue to read the media will regularly require human intervention and access to the machines (hardware and software).
The most important solution to this problem is to reject any software system that uses closed or undocumented proprietary storage formats over open, non-proprietary ones. But this cuts the profits of some organizations; witness Microsoft fighting so hard to force use of its proprietary and badly-documented Word file format (to lock-in users) and its fights to stop use of the openly-documented Open Document Format (ODF) such as is used by OpenOffice.org. If files are in non-proprietary formats, the vendor can't hold your data hostage, either intentionally or by default (if the vendor goes out of business or decides to stop supporting the program you're using but won't release details about the data formats in use.)
As Maureen Smith pointed out in Robert A. Heinlein's To Sail Beyond The Sunset, "Whenever someone asks, 'why do they' or 'why don't they', the answer is almost always 'money'." Keeping data in digital format either saves a lot of money or makes it possible to do things that might be impossible outside of a computer, either because of the difficulty of manipulating images in the real world or it would be exorbitantly expensive. Which is going to be cheaper: a movie rendered digitally using Blender or one made by stop-action photography of individual cel images? They had to do it that way in the 1950s - also labor was cheaper then - but today much more can be done with digital images.
But its part of all development, every improvement has drawbacks. Paper was cheaper than clay tablets but the acids in paper means anything over a couple-hundred years old is either a copy or well-preserved. Monks typically recopied manuscripts as the old ones started to decay. With acid-free paper we got spoiled by libraries that could last hundreds of years as long as the books never got wet. Electronic information has to be copied as older, less-efficient media are replaced; it's a drawback of the technology as a result of how much cheaper storage keeps becoming. It's no different than it has been, we've always had to replace things as they wore out, it's just the cost to store each item has dropped so dramatically that we have a lot more of them. Replacing media over time is a maintenance issue, and maintenance is always an issue that nobody wants to deal with or pay for. And that is the whole problem. We're not preparing for maintenance by expecting it will need to be done and providing the resources necessary, being blindsided into being unable to perform maintenance (by proprietary file formats and vendor lock-in), and not doing the maintenance. So we pay the price of our short-sightedness.