>>3007The are multiple aspects to this, which have to separated.
First: If you have a byte array, how do you interpret the data to make sense of it? This is what you mean. I don't worry about it. As you say, .txt (ASCII) is very simple. Even if knowledge about very common file formats like PNG gets lost, descriptions of these formats exist in .txt form. This would make it relatively simple to recover. Before you get to the files, you need to know how filesystems work, which is part of the problem. Also some formats may virtually unrecoverable, like DRM protected shit, which most non-pirated commercial audio and video media will be in the near future.
Second: The robustness of physical storage. This is a huge problem. Floppy discs become unreadable after a very short time. When I still used them, this could be as little as weeks. Hard discs demagnetize. Optical discs rot. Flash storage loses electrical charge. None of that shit will survive. People who deal with archiving seem to have some ideas how to solve this. Also, digital media can be copied without loss. But that might not help. It requires someone to keep the media "alive" by copying it and backing it up all the time. Who says there won't be data centers, which burn down to the ground, which had the last copy of certain data?
Third: How to read digital media. Before you analyze a byte stream or a filesystem, you need to know how to get these bytes from a media. If you were given a hard disk but no computer with SATA ports, how the fuck would you read it? You could try to re-implement the SATA protocol. You could try to read the platters directly using some incredibly complicated method, then reverse engineer the proprietary, unknown layout the HDD vendor used, with yet unknown codes used to encode bits. Good luck with that. Better hope that this archeological data with 3000 year old furry porn is something you found on a forgotten cloud.
>>3010APNG is actually just PNG with more than one image. PNG is extremely simple. It's just raw image data in its simplest form compressed with one of the oldest and most widespread compression algorithms. Which someone in the thread called complicated, which is ironic.