How does bitrot work?
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It totally depends on the medium, but either the medium itself degrades over time, or the phenomenon holding the bit (magnetic/charge) decays over time. Most storage mediums and drive formats have error correction so can tolerate a certain number of erroneous bits – but once a threshold is reached then data errors occur.
For something like a pressed CD (non writeable), oxygen from the air diffuses between the layers – particularly at the edges and slowly damages the bits.
For a magnetic hard drive, magnetic fields decay slowly over time.
For a charge based flash drive, the charge can gradually leak out.
Then you get things like cosmic rays which can flip a few bits if they hit a storage medium. Over time this can build up to cause issues.
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