I think it ends up being the responsibility of individual families to preserve their digital history as much as their old physical stuff.
For example, I have digitized probably over 5k photographs and several dozen home movies (that I had to record from VHS tapes and even some old film reels), and several thousand pages of documents - report cards, letters, tax forms, etc - of my extend families over the years. That entire archive is now around 20GB big (I have "new" stuff and "old" stuff, pre and post 2000 separate) and I have it backed up in the cloud, on three personal computers, my own external hard drives, and I have it burned in sets of dvds in three places (two homes and one storage unit). I made sure it was all formatted with open standards (extenion-less pdfs, pngs, jpgs, theora, vorbis, odfs, etc). The archives themselves are all UDF formatted.
This kind of stuff is not going to magically become unusable. The formats aren't going anyway. The transport interfaces might, but someone will be able to read dvds, plug usb, and plug sata for several decades at least. And I fully intend to update that collection (probably around 2020) and include the next decade in it in whatever formats are most appropriately modern at the time. At least as long as I still have something like gstreamer to pipe all the audio / video through to transcode it from speex / vorbis to opus or whatever else turns up.
Most families should do something like that. I doubt many of them are.
For example, I have digitized probably over 5k photographs and several dozen home movies (that I had to record from VHS tapes and even some old film reels), and several thousand pages of documents - report cards, letters, tax forms, etc - of my extend families over the years. That entire archive is now around 20GB big (I have "new" stuff and "old" stuff, pre and post 2000 separate) and I have it backed up in the cloud, on three personal computers, my own external hard drives, and I have it burned in sets of dvds in three places (two homes and one storage unit). I made sure it was all formatted with open standards (extenion-less pdfs, pngs, jpgs, theora, vorbis, odfs, etc). The archives themselves are all UDF formatted.
This kind of stuff is not going to magically become unusable. The formats aren't going anyway. The transport interfaces might, but someone will be able to read dvds, plug usb, and plug sata for several decades at least. And I fully intend to update that collection (probably around 2020) and include the next decade in it in whatever formats are most appropriately modern at the time. At least as long as I still have something like gstreamer to pipe all the audio / video through to transcode it from speex / vorbis to opus or whatever else turns up.
Most families should do something like that. I doubt many of them are.