Vint Cerf, one of the ‘fathers’ of the Internet, has said he is very concerned that images and documents will be lost eventually as the computers they are saved on become obsolete. Currently the Vice-President of Google, Mr Cerf has said that as systems fall out of use, the data stored on them could be lost.
He is concerned that in the future, there will be little or no record of the 21st century as we enter what he terms a digital Dark Age.
Technology
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Mr Cerf said he is now focusing his attention on this problem that threatens to eradicate our history. Currently many of our memories, family photos and other information is stored either on hard drives or on the cloud.
But as technology moves forward, these memories could be lost as the digital revolution continues to develop rapidly. Mr Cerf spoke of how this has already happened – old documents in formats no longer current cannot be read by the latest software and compatibility between new and old versions isn’t always a guarantee.
This means that over time, we could have a vast archives of digital content with no idea what it contains and no way to access it.
Digital vellum
His proposal to try to deal with the problem is to preserve every piece of hardware and software to ensure it never becomes so obsolete that it cannot be accessed. Much like storing items in a museum, the software could be kept in digital form in the cloud. This would mean that future generations would be able to access the data even though the systems they used were vastly different.
He described the solution as taking an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application with the operating system, a description of the machine running it and preserving all of these. This digital snapshot could be used to recreate the past in the future.
One suggested problem is there is no guarantee that a company today, even Google itself, will still exist in say the year 3000. So how would the data be safeguarded in the long run? Mr Cerf’s idea is that the snapshot could be transplanted from one place to another so it could move from a cloud, to another cloud and then to a person’s machine to be used. The important thing would be where they were stored and knowing this, along with how to ‘unpack’ the parts and interpret the information they held. The biggest problem will be if people in the future can interpret the instructions and be able to make use of them.
One such idea may be to use digital vellum, an idea demonstrated by Mahadev Satyanatayanan at Carnegie Mellon University.
