BBC News – Google’s Vint Cerf warns of ‘digital Dark Age’.
A very good point. Many of our pictures are just bits of data in our camera or computer. Will our future generations have the technology to read and process the backups we have on CDs, DVDs, external hard drives?
Look at how technology has changed in just the last 30 years. Who has a floppy disk drive any more? You might have some disks lying around, but you can’t read them without the equipment.
CDs and DVDs can suffer from what is known as “bit rot” where over time the data becomes lost.
If there is a population here on earth a thousand years from now, will they know about our existence? They’ll probably still see remnants of the Egyptian civilization since the Great Pyramid and Sphinx will probably still be here.
It’s very good to back up your data (pictures, documents, etc.) but also make sure you can still read and access them.