When I was a child I was very fond of my vinyl record set of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. I say "vinyl", not "LP" because those records spun at 78 revolutions per minute. They were thick, heavy, and seemingly robust enough to last forever.

Yeah, OK, you're already laughing at me because, of course, those records had been made obsolete by the time I was old enough to drink. Now that I'm 56, I've seen the vast excitement over the arrival of VHS tapes – and the shrug that accompanied their demise. Plus: Betamax videocassettes, reels of recording tape, DAT tapes, audio cassettes, eight-track cartridges, and 5.25in floppy disks. Now, Sony announced this week, 3.5in floppy disks are set to join the ranks of dead media.

To be sure, it's hard to mourn something with such tiny capacity. My digital camera takes images that won't fit on a single floppy disk (which, by the way, held 1.4MB of data, not the 1.44MB beloved of marketers), and stores these on an 8GB – gigabytes! – card the size of a postage stamp. A 1.4MB floppy won't hold a single average-length pop song; it might just manage a book-length manuscript in today's bloated word-processing formats.

But the 3.5in disk was revolutionary in its day. It held double the amount of data of its predecessor, the 5.25in floppy, and at the time 1.4MB was a lot. Like social media now, it spawned media scares; I seem to remember tabloid stories of them being passed around, filled with pornography and computer viruses, in school playgrounds. But these things die hard: my desk drawer still holds 30 or 40 of them, alongside a USB floppy drive carefully wrapped to keep out dust. Ultimately, the drive matters as much as – or more than – the disks.

The constant flow of changing and obsolete formats has a distinct cost in caretaking time and attention. If the data matters to you, you must check frequently to make sure you can still read it and transfer it to new media as old ones die off. Libraries have archivists to manage this; families don't. My childhood photographs may be faded – but they're viewable. Will the same be true of the photographs you posted last week on Facebook when your six-year-old is my age?

The BBC made this mistake in 1986, when it created a digital "Domesday book" on – hah! – an Acorn computer and video disc player. By 1999, the digital book was unreadable; it took a team of researchers three years to develop emulator software to unlock it. The original from 1086 is, of course, still readable now.

And yet, the digital Domesday researchers may have had an easier time than their 2050 counterparts will: they knew what they were trying to emulate. As a sound engineer friend always tells me, you can analyse magnetic media and fashion a reader, but you can't do the same with today's optical discs – CDs and DVDs. For permanent accessibility, printed copies are still your best bet.