The question is: What is more likely in 1000 years to still exist and being readable. The papers caught in some lost ruins or some form of storage media?
Sure, as long as the media is copied there is a chance of survival, but will this then be "average" material or things we now consider interesting, only? Will the chain hold or will it become as uninteresting as many other things were over time? Will the Organisation doing it be funded? Will the location where this happens be spares from war?
For today's historians the random finds are important artifacts to understand "average" people's lives as the well preserved documents are legends on the mighty people.
Having lots of material all over gives a chance for some to survive and from 40 years or so back we were in a good spot. Lots of paper allover about everything. Analog vinyl records, which might be readable in a future to learn about our music. But now all on storage media, where many forms see data loss, where the format is outdated and (when looking from a thousand years away) fast change of data formats etc.
> The question is: What is more likely in 1000 years to still exist and being readable. The papers caught in some lost ruins or some form of storage media?
But that's just survivorship bias. The vast vast vast majority of all written sheets of paper have been lost to history. Those deemed worthy were carefully preserved, some of the rest was preserved by a fluke. The same is happening with digital media.
> What is more likely in 1000 years to still exist and being readable. The papers caught in some lost ruins or some form of storage media?
The storage media. We have evidence to support this:
* original paper works from 1000 years ago are insanely rare
* more recent storage media provide much more content
How many digital copies of Beowulf do we have? Millions?
How many paper copies from 1000 years ago? one
how many other works from 1000 years ago do we have zero copies of thanks to paper's fragility and thus don't even know existed? probably a lot
However that one paper, stating a random fact, might tell more about the people than an epic poem.
You can't have a fully history without either.