Back when I was in the streaming media business, we rehabbed a few old Ampex Quad decks and made a little bit of money remastering deteriorating Hee Haw and Roy Acuff shows onto digital Beta tape. We tried selling archival services in our StorageTek robot for a few years, but the guy who was funding the whole thing ran out of cash before he got his remote backup site built.

Ultimately, reliable digital archival is a continual process of copying from one evanescent medium to another, different in degree, not in kind, from a monastery full of scribes. The reliability of the archive lies in social commitment to the copying process, not in the illusory permanence of the media.