You imply that conventional hard drives are the only storage mechanism that exists. It's a valid point, but there are ways to keep data around. The monks of 500-1000 years ago were writing books that were meant to be kept for a long period of time, so they were already thinking past their own lifetime (even a monk's comment in the article mentions that).

My hard drives of less then a decade ago are already unreadable, but my code is still around.

But Google's will still work. :)

It turns out it's a hell of a job to go through and figure out what to delete. It's far cheaper to just buy more disks and continue expanding the storage system and never delete anything...

Now I'm imagining an artisanal service that prints out all of your code- or at least the ones your take pride in the most- then illuminates it for you, before binding it. Now that's a coder's heirloom.