Why on earth
would anyone who cares about data preservation use a
closed data format?!
Because sometimes they are prohibited from doing otherwise
[...]
Well, true. Anything can be done badly. But coming up with advice for
long-term data preservation for someone under the imposed constraint of
a closed data format is a bit like coming up with advice for someone
who wants to build a high-performance car under the imposed constraint
that the wheels be square: the constraint breaks the goal so
fundamentally that there's not much point in even trying.
My advice for anyone interested in data preservation in a closed format
is to burn it to a CD or DVD and leave it at that; it will almost
certainly go unusable before the medium fails or becomes unreadable.
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