thecolorsblend2 said:

Data is always at risk for being lost or damaged beyond repair, whether it's physical or digital media. That being said, ROTS will never have to be remastered -- at least not in the same sense that, say, the Godfather has been.

This will only become truer as storage drive capacity expands beyond what it is today. The expense and logistics of terrabytes of storage is only an obstacle right now. It's only going to become easier, cheaper and more efficient from here on in.

In the case of Star Wars thats probably true, because the material is basically controlled by one company who only has to worry about those films, so keeping 6 films preserved is easy. The problem comes with a studio--how do you preserve 100, 000 films digitally? Its much easier to just make a celluloid negative and keep that properly preserved in a climate-controlled warehouse with thousands of other films. If your library has 100, 000 titles you want preserved, at roughly 200 GB per film thats 20 000 000 GB. But you can't have just one, because digital data is so easily corrupted, you would make a back up, so now its 40 000 000 GB. Not only do you have to pay the huge electric bill to keep those millions of hard drives spinning, you have to have a guy checking and maintaining them, and becase hard drives only have a lifespan of about 2 or 3 years, that means all 40 000 000 GB has to be back up almost bi-annually. Thats an enormous effort, not to mention a huge cost (just the act of telecining them alone would cost near a billion dollars).

So I don't really see digital storage replacng the old fashioned way any time soon, not in our lifetimes. They'll continue to co-exist, and as studios slowly build up their digital library storage cost will go down and physical hard drive space will shrink as well, but it'll still be a co-existance for a very long time, and they'll still continue to preserve the negatives they have, they aren't going to just chuck their history.