This whole thread has just triggered me into finding out why current versions of MS Office are failing to open some 20+ year old documents that I have. Turns out, MS Office no longer supports Word for DOS/WordPerfect/AbiWord files - which is fine I guess, but to rub salt into the wound, there used to be converter plug-ins available, but MS not longer host them for download (I guess the 400kb archive was taking up too much space or something). I just had to resort to hunting down the archive and downloading it from some unknown/untrusted file directory. Anyway, it works and I can now open all my ancient documents in Office 2013 - which is not bad considering the converter plug-ins were written for Office 97.
Regarding the article - I'm not sure I understand the concept behind storing a set of the recovered files in a Cloud service. Surely a second HDD with the same contents stored at a second location would be cheaper in the long run. The HDD would last 20+ years if stored correctly - you can't guarantee that your consumer level Cloud service will still be around even in 10 years time.
"Container" is simply a place where you can read the content today. That can be a HDD, it can be AWS, it can be a USB drive - doesn't matter as long as you have a system that can read it. Once that "container" starts to get near it's EOL you transfer it to a new "container".
I wouldn't trust a HDD for 20 years. Keep a backup mirror locally and a backup offsite (cloud or at a relative), what matter is that the transfer is automatically running in a periodic manner.
Regarding the article - I'm not sure I understand the concept behind storing a set of the recovered files in a Cloud service. Surely a second HDD with the same contents stored at a second location would be cheaper in the long run. The HDD would last 20+ years if stored correctly - you can't guarantee that your consumer level Cloud service will still be around even in 10 years time.