In Some Sense, Lost Scrolls in Deserts Are Better Technology Than 'Modern' Computing
LOTS and lots of human knowledge is doomed to disappear for good. Even patents, whose original purpose was to prevent knowledge from being lost (e.g. with some company's demise or a person's death). The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) trying to transition to proprietary Microsoft formats is only part of a broader picture though. It's about more than formal literature which mostly harms human productivity.
Hollywood is already losing a lot of material, sometimes due to wildfires and sometimes due to human errors. This isn't even some prehistoric material; this stuff is less than a century old! Money isn't the issue; they're swimming in it.
Unless we make or produce lots of physical, printed copies of things (including photographs, maybe receipts too), studying the history of our present time some in the future will be incredibly complicated. Our current ("modern") computer systems are far more complex than they ought (or need) to be and even storage devices don't keep the data on them for very long. We wrote about it months ago. Accessing data as recent as 20 years ago can already be very challenging, not just expensive.
There are several challenges: extraction and deciphering (encoding, language etc.) are among these. Standards are imperative, but will documentation of the standards vanish as well? Are the standards possible to comprehend (then simply implement) or have they devolved into bloated garbage like "5G"? Are there pre-requisites like complex instruments (peripheral to these standards or standard chaining)? Are they elegant by design and objective/s? Or intentionally bad standards like MP3, where the badness was designed to help acquire more software patents on the format?
If future people can even figure out how to extract and then interpret such data, will it be the stuff of utmost value? Writing and printing lots of books is hardly a solution if there's too little demand for them (a limitation on number of distributed copies, lack of financial incentive to write these etc.) and Google 'forgets' information as soon as it is financially convenient to do so. It's not in the business of preserving human knowledge. Keeping data alive and information alive is not the same thing, but the two are connected. Nowadays both go out of circulation very fast. █