Throughout the last century, the dominant method of film preservation was sticking the master reels into a temperature and humidity-controlled vault deep in the desert. This method ends up costing about a grand a year. Films stored on digital media, however, cost more than ten times as much to archive.
And when the entire movie has been digitally created from start to finish (shot on digital or Pixar-style), it costs a whopping $208,000 to keep all the hard drives, discs, and so on in working order and make sure all the data is still intact. What with Hollywood moving towards an all-digital process, this could prove to be very expensive. Maybe they should just let us keep a record in our hearts – that worked for “All Dogs Go To Heaven.”
Digital movies are more expensive to store than film [The Inquirer]