Google executive Vint Cerf, known as a “father of the internet,” said that he’s worried that all the things we’ve been saving on computers will eventually be lost. At the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Cerf said he’s focusing on how to resolve this problem “that threatens to eradicate our history.” Or, what he has coined “the digital Dark Age.”
“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,” said Cerf. That X-ray snapshot should be transportable so one would be able to move it from say a Google cloud to some other cloud or machine.