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honestly it’s such a tragic question, because in some sense i don’t think there’s any true way to preserve anything. the conditions of observation are constantly changing, and often the art object itself is in flux at all times
this is more pronounced with physical art like paintings where you have to be incredibly intentional with elongating their life span, but i think it also applies to digital art as well
while it’s trivially true that even a copied file will not be truly “identical” (takes up a different space on a hard drive), that’s not terribly aesthetically relevant
but the context of the interpreter are always changing, and impossible to recreate. so preservation is a bit of a misnomer maybe, but approximation of a shared experience still carries great significance even if it can’t be perfect
and in some ways, i’m not sure i would want it to be perfect. the inability to replicate demands greater significance for each encounter. and the dissonance from prior experiences when revisiting a work is its own generative ground