Forever and a day

I was struck by the note in this New York Times article that written material stored electronically on "floppy disks, CDs and hard drives . . . degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper." The article deals with the challenges of preserving authors' archives for university libraries--e.g. Rushdie, Updike. But what about all the other writers, published or not, who slave over something on their computers, and put it away for a few years, thinking they can always pick it up again later, only to find the 1s and 0s have gotten all mixed up? How many masterpieces will be lost for want of a print-out?