Internet users have been warned to print out copies of important documents and photographs before they are lost forever.
Google’s vice president and internet pioneer, Vint Cerf, said it was time to preserve digital data.
Present society will be difficult to understand by future generations because so much information is stored digitally. With rapid advances in technology, old files are becoming inaccessible.
This, he warned, could make the 21st century appear to be a second “Dark Age” which covered Britain for three centuries after the Romans left and about which people know very little.
“If we don’t find a solution our 21st Century will be an information black hole” with a lot of our history lost.
Great quantities of personal documentation are in digital form, but there is no guarantee that these will be preserved, or may no longer be accessible.
He stressed the importance of taking other steps to preserve data and recommended printing important documents such as family photos.
“If we want to preserve them the same way we preserve books and so on, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create will be rendered far into the future.”
As it now stands, software is frequently upgraded to the point where that which is supposed to preserve images cannot read older formats.
Mr Cerf said it was unclear what would be the most important data of our generation so it was important to preserve as much as possible.
