People are conflagrating some separate issues in this thread.
One, digital is not archival. If a small part of the digital file is corrupted, the file is all but lost. I have more than a few images that were backed up, and the back up corrupted the back up, etc. I have TIF files from Photoshop 4 that are not readable on the current iteration (thanks Adobe!). If you think you are immune to digital decay, you are smoking some crack.
Two, a silver print (as well as a color print) will last longer than a digital file without much effort at all. Most old photographs are doing just fine today, 100 years plus on. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a digital file left alone will not be readable in 100 years. If you think the opposite, you again are smokin' some crack.
Three, whether or not an image is important is irrelevant. Most images are not important, but it isn't up to us to decide. If your grandson remembers you because of a print he found, it is easy for him to keep the print because he can see it. If he finds a hard drive with rust on it, it is going in the trash. If you think something different, you are smokin' some crack.
I think you can see where I stand on this. Experience has taught me well. If you have your head buried in the sand I feel sorry for you.
I see your point about 'one small part corrupted', and it's true to a point. However, it's more to do with using the wrong file formats like TIFF with Adobe extensions.
There is no reason why data cannot be stored in a format which will not only be readable by future computers, but be so simple that simply looking at the bytes within will explain to a competent programmer how to display it.
But people don't.
People do as they are told and save in whatever format Adobe, Apple or Microsoft tell them to. If we wanted to get serious about digital archiving, we could, but few are interested.
People *can* be immune to digital decay (as much we can be immune to anything, anyway), but we choose not to be, it's that simple.
With commonplace networking these days, you could have 10 perfect backups if you wanted to. It's possible some nuclear attack would wipe them all out, but I can't imagine printed photographs faring too well either.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a film user, don't use digital at all, but digital *is* very easy to backup if you know how.
It's easy to use the example of old disks to say that historically we've not been able to reliably backup data, but that was then and this is now. Had we had network services like Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Drive, or one of many other services, then maybe that data would be perfectly safe, sitting in 10 perfectly replicated backups.
We can have as good backup as we want to, but few know how, and fewer even care.
