How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.
If you want data to survive you've always needed to copy it. Digital storage just makes that easier to do in bulk. Copying Bibles was a full time task for huge teams of monks but you can (and should) make backups routinely on a daily or weekly basis with barely a thought.
The big issue isn't the technology, it's the vast amounts of data that are being created at this point. Storage is cheap, but the labor that goes into managing the longevity of datasets isn't: it's essentially continually keeping your infrastructure up-to-date whilst also ensuring the integrity and readability of the datasets as was intended when they were first created. It implies regular checks of bit integrity, readability of your data, checking that you can restore your data, ensuring that you can access the data, making sure that you can find the data and everything is catalogued, ensuring that you have the rights and license to use the data,...
When it comes to physical archives of the past, you have to be aware of your own survivorship bias. We only have an idea of what is preserved to the extent that documents are archived, recorded and thus discoverable.
What we do not know is how much knowledge and information was lost to the past. When you look at documents, you're always limited to what's there. And when you hit the boundaries of what's there, then you may have indications that there was far more in the past, but you have to conclude: sadly that's lost. Either because it is physically lost, or because it might be somewhere in the archive but it's not registered yet in a catalogue and therefor not accessible.
That's why I think that making backups with "barely a thought" is only as effective as to the extent to which you have organized your data, used accessible / readable data formats and filesystems.
For instance, most people these days generate endless streams of photos with their digital devices, which then get automagically uploaded to cloud services. And that's great. The downside of that is that your ability to find a specific picture from 5 years ago is entirely restricted to the extent that you were able to organize and add specific metadata to that picture. Let alone, if you did take the opportunity to do so.
That's why I advise people to sit down, and take time to go through their digital albums to pick the nicest or most important pictures they have, print them out on quality photo paper in several copies and store them with labels in albums at different physical locations.
When it comes to longevity, your physical albums will still be accessible to your descendants some 70 or 100 years down the line. Something that isn't remotely guaranteed by cloud solutions.
And that's just photos. Consider e-mail or the countless of closed messaging apps you have been using these past years. And then scale the problem beyond the personal but to entirety of large organizations, many of which are required by law to keep an archive of their documents, correspondence and so on, not just for decades but sometimes also for perpetuity.