Vint Cerf, a “father of the internet”, says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost.
Currently a Google vice-president, he believes this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete.
He fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a “digital Dark Age”.
Cerf made his comments at a large science conference in San Jose.
Our life, our memories, our most cherished family photographs increasingly exist as bits of information - on our hard drives or in “the cloud.” But as technology moves on, they risk being lost in the wake of an accelerating digital revolution.
“Old formats of documents that we have created or presentations may not be readable by the latest version of the software because backwards compatibility is not always guaranteed,” said Cerf.
Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete - just like what happens in a museum - but in digital form, in servers in the cloud.
“The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. And that digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future.”