I think at some point we might need to accept that preserving every piece of human creation ever made is not possible and perhaps not even desirable.
This is kind of the problem with data hoarding: it’s more about the act of preservation than the content being preserved. The whole practice is based off of anxiety and fear of loss rather than any productive purpose. There’s often low to zero demand for a huge amount of the content.
Just like my grandma’s record collection or fine China, it all amounts to a bunch of stuff that meant something to someone else but not to me. It was offered to me in a vain hope that I might enjoy it in the same way, despite the great improbability of that being the case.
That’s why those items are siting in a landfill somewhere.
I would guess, for example, that most people read very few books that were written before the 1800s. They would be difficult to read, their subject matter would be foreign, and without extensive rewriting/translation/adaptation, they wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Most certainly there are many classic works that survive much longer than a few hundred years, but the percentage is a tiny sliver of all the stories people have created. And that’s ultimately perfectly okay. That’s just how things work. Nobody has enough time on earth to consume such a massive amount of content that humans have made, and a lot of it is straight up bad, or just repetitive of other similar content.
Lastly, there is also another possibility entirely: that the original creators don’t want future generations to see their work.
I think it’s important to remember that all rights are reserved to the creator of the work. As an artist I can sell a print of a painting for a year and decide that it will never be sold again after that. It’s my right to stop selling new copies and my right to prevent people from redistributing copies until the work reaches public domain, because it’s my work.
I know in the case of corporate filmmaking the lack of available works is more about apathy to specific old pieces of content basically being worthless to them, but it’s still a little point to keep in mind.