"You know, it's been restored several times. The handle's been replaced 3 times, and the head's been replaced 2 times, but it's still the hatchet that he used to chop down the cherry tree."
Memories fade, clay tablets turn to dust, papyrus rots, paper degrades, photos fade, vinyl albums warp, tapes stretch, Zip drives get the click of death and die. It's an old problem. Knowledge survives and gets passed down by regularly retranscribing it to new media.
In the late 1980s I was using punched cards with an IBM 1165 (IIRC) to control a Calcomp flatbed plotter. Hollerith patented the cards in 1889. The pace of change is a little faster now, of course.
If it's important information that needs to last for decades, or if someone cares about it, then it probably needs to be transferred to new media every 5 years or so. Since Google (and others) have shown that money is to be made from information of all sorts, I expect that someone will keep doing the transcription for a long time to come. Baring some catastrophe, I don't expect a digital dark age.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who still had a couple of boxes of Hollerith cards less than 10 years ago.)