Media asserts stored as digital files in a mass storage system can be kept on any appropriate media, no matter how they are encoded. Unlike a discrete storage system, where each type of physical media has a limited number of data encoding formats that it can support, record and playback, in a mass storage system, the file is fully portable between media types.

In terms of dealing with obsolescence this means that migration between generations of media can now be accomplished by simply copying the data over. A digital copy operation of this kind can have perfect fidelity. Migrating across dozens or even hundreds of generation can be accomplished with no loss in quality at all.