Pure, pristine 1s and 0s only exist as an abstraction. Cloud services simply hide the physical storage devices in remote locations. They protect the data through redundancy and backup more reliably than you would on your own. Instead of you worrying about upgrading to the next generation of hardware and migrating your data, you leave it to to professionals. But this doesn’t solve the problem of proprietary or obsolete data formats, or knowing what data must be kept, what may be of interest in the future or what may be safely discarded. It may be possible to read the sequences of 1s and 0s long into the future, but future readers would also need to understand the formats, metadata and context of the information for it to have any value. Although the software industry has made strides in developing common data formats, archiving, migrating and curating data in cloud storage is a multi-generation, civilization-level project.
