Best thing I ever heard from the head of archives at the BBC:

Once you format shift, you will always be format shifting.

Keep your originals whenever you can.

As someone who spent the last 2 days figuring out how best to digitise my father's old Hi8, Digital8 and MiniDV tapes, I take umbridge with this!

Keep originals if you can, but make copies ASAP, as close to lossless as possible. Don't depend on the right hardware being around in the future.

I can see the value in this, but .. originals, and the gear to read them, do not last forever. Plus for many formats the act of reading puts wear on the physical artifacts. So if you want to actually use the information, you have to format shift it to digital in the first place. And then you're back to the same question as the rest of us, how to maintain the bits.

I don't understand this phrase, are you able to explain it?