Everyone has a camera, but WHERE will these images be in 5 years time?

The same law that dictates your prints won't catch fire, suffer water damage, torn by rodents, etc.

Or, they could just keep the digital files. Much easier and much more reliable, which is why you only hear about banks keeping customer information on paper books when prefixed by "it'd be utterly crazy for...".

Into the trash bin? no offense, I loved the look-n-feel of my own Spotmatic, but negatives are about the hardest sort of media to preserve ever. At least with prints you can easily make multiple copies, same as digital files, but with negatives it's so much of a pain I've never heard of anyone who does it routinely.

Rule #1 of reliability is: redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Everything fails, and when it inevitably does, you want to have a replacement ready by yesterday. Shoeboxes full of prints at relatives' places works fine for most purposes, but good ol' RAID5 and off-site backup works better.

--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/Draek