Digital data including key historical documents and images may vanish as regular updates and improvements to hardware and software could make them inaccessible in the future, warns Vint Cerf, a ‘father of the internet’.
Cerf, who also serves as a Google vice president, predicted that future historians seeking the evidence of 21st century could be hit with a digital desert similar to the dark age, which he describes as a ‘digital Dark Age’.
Cerf was quoted by the BBC as saying: "Old formats of documents that we’ve created or presentations may not be readable by the latest version of the software because backwards compatibility is not always guaranteed."
"And so what can happen over time is that even if we accumulate vast archives of digital content, we may not actually know what it is."
"The 22nd century and future centuries after that will wonder about us but they’ll have great difficulty knowing much because so much of what we’ve left behind may be bits that are uninterpretable."
In a bid to preserve old software and hardware, Cerf necessitated the development of ‘digital vellum’ in a bid to recover obsolete files regardless of when they were created.
Mr Cerf’s ‘digital vellum’ concept has been demonstrated by Carnegie Mellon University’s Mahadev Satyanarayanan.
"When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history."
"We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future."
