Simply put, archiving digital images is a nightmare. It's the equivalent of keeping plates spinning at the end of sticks, and those plates keep getting bigger and bigger.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about digital photography. I'm of the opinion that film is going to be around for a long time to come. You may see some of the lesser films disappear as time goes by, but you will be able to buy film until May 23, 2037. And I'm sure it will become more expensive. Why do I say that? Well, look at 8mm movie film. When is the last time you've seen someone use it? You can STILL buy it today. The installed base for 35mm film has to be magnitudes greater than 8mm ever was. Don't fall for the panic that film is going to disappear next year. Film is too convenient for too many people not to be marketable.
Where I do love digital is the back end. When I shoot B&W film I develop it myself and then scan the film with a dedicated film scanner and make prints on an Epson using the Black-Only printing method. It's the best of both worlds.
I started in photography when I was 14-years-old, around 1980. You do the math from there. I still have about everything I've ever shot in negative or slide form. I was going through tons of old negatives a few years ago. My dad was in the hospital at the time and eventually died. I was shooting with a little digicam at the time, thinking it was the greatest thing ever and I would never go back to film.
Then I ran across some frames of me with my parents shot by my girlfriend with my camera when I graduated from college. I never bothered to print them since at the time they didn't seem all that important. When I came across the negatives I had forgotten they existed. It turns out that those are the only frames I have of me together with my mom and dad. He didn't like to have his picture taken too much and besides, I was always behind the camera, not in front of it.
What may not seem important today may be important to you or your family years from now. Think before you delete your images on purpose!
Then I began to wonder what would have happened if those pictures were taken with a digital camera 15 years ago. Would I still have them today? My guess is probably not. I may have deleted them to save space. What we think isn't important now often becomes so later. Or they would have vanished when a hard drive went bad, or if I HAD written them to a CD maybe it would have become unreadable. That scared me quite a bit. But once I developed that negative it sat there for all those years waiting for me to discover it again. Sure, it could have been lost or destroyed in a flooding or fire. But that seems less likely to happen with film than digital images vanishing in a blink of the eye.
Digital is great for a lot of reasons but it's not the end all of traditional film-based photography. I will admit that I actually own a DSLR and find there are times that it's handy to have. I urge you to think about how you are going to archive all those images you shoot. I know that many people will never bother to make a backup CD or at least copy their digicam images to a backup hard drive. All hard drives die and CD or DVDs can go bad. It's just a matter of when, not if, a hard drive will eventuall fail. When that happens a lot of irreplaceable images will be gone forever. That ought to scare everybody.
If you are going to shoot digital, a print can serve, in the long term, as your archival output. Make prints of any digital images that will cause you anguish once they are lost.
Currently I make three copies of all digital images. Two copies go to hard drives and the third gets burned to a DVD. To keep a schedule I archive images by month on DVD. It keeps everything managable in terms of space and time to stick to a monthly schedule.
Once the hard drives are filled they will be put on a shelf. If one should die a clone can be made from the other. The DVDs serve as a last-ditch fail safe. Eventually I will leave these with my brother for safe keeping off site.
I'm sure there are better ways to archive, but that's how I'm keeping those plates spinning for now.