Digital preservation has been happening since the 1980s in the civilian world and probably for at least two decades before that in the military world. The science of creating digital backups of data in order to prevent them from being lost is really as much an art as it is a science. This is especially true if you consider what the first part of the digital preservation movement was like.
When computer hardware was new, there were many competing storage forms that came on in a relatively short period of time. Five-inch floppy disks were replaced by 3.5-inch floppy disks which in their turn were replaced by CDs and eventually DVDs. For each of these new storage methods, new hardware was needed. Whereas the 5-inch standard might have been sold on all computers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the fact of the matter is that if you want to read one of those today you need to buy an expensive piece of hardware in order to get the job done.
That being said, the obsolete nature of technology that used to plague people interested in digital preservation is starting to be dealt with in a way that is intelligent as hardware companies start to understand how their advances affect their clients. A good example of this is the CD to DVD evolution which is comparable in industry terms to the 5-inch to 3.5-inch standard. Although DVDs are likely going to replace CDs as long as data storage sizes become big enough on average, DVD players can still read CDs and will likely be able to read them for the foreseeable future. This was not true of the older storage disks and it is becoming even truer for modern storage devices like external hard drives and flash drives, all of which tend to use the USB standard.
Although there are still risks involved with pinning yourself to one storage standard for digital preservation, they are becoming less important in the grand scheme of things.