Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science taking place in San Jose, California, Vint Cerf, one of the men credited with the invention of Internet and a current Vice President of Google, warned relying solely on digital data storage to keep books, texts and photographs may be short-sighted. "If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?,” Cerf said. "We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it," he said. E&T; writes: 
 
 "Comparing the future knowledge about the 21st century to the post-Roman period in Western Europe of which relatively little is known due to the lack of written records, Cerf said the future generations may as well 'wonder about us' while having great difficulty to understand due to the interpretable bits of information we leave behind. "In our zeal to get excited about digitising we digitise photographs thinking it's going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong," he said. "I would say if there are photos you are really concerned about create a physical instance of them. Print them out." Referring to a book by American Pulitzer winning writer Doris Kearns Goodwin who reconstructed conversations between Abraham Lincoln and his friends through the analysis of his correspondence, Cerf said future historians may struggle to do the same for current luminaries due to the either missing or unreadable digital record. As The Telegraph, quoting Cerf, notes: "Such a book might not be possible to write about the people living today ... — the digital content such as emails that an author might need will have 'evaporated because nobody saved it, or it's around but it's not interpretable because it was created by software that's 100 years old'." Cerf calls the problem the "digital vellum" and says one solution might be to take a digital "snapshot" when an item is stored, recording all the elements needed to reproduce it at a later date.
– Think we've stored so much data that future historians will be swimming in the stuff? Not necessarily: A Google executive says the "digital Dark Ages" may be coming, when people will have little idea of how we think or live today, NPR reports. Google Vice President Vint Cerf expressed his concern last week at a conference of scientists in California: "If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?" he says. "We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it." Cerf's worry is that future "modern computers" will have no way of reading content from today's software. Comparing future historians to Doris Kearns Goodwin—who relied quite a bit on letters of the period when writing Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln's cabinet—Cerf warns that today's email stash could vanish "because nobody saved it" or because it can't be read since it was created on century-old software, per the Independent. And he discards the notion that "important" stuff will be stored, saying that "sometimes documents and transactions images and so on may turn out to have an importance which is not understood for hundreds of years." His advice for us: Print those photos. For big data savers: Embrace the idea of "digital vellum," which involves snapping a pic of every way a file can be opened, and storing it with the original file, reports Engineering and Technology Magazine. "We're going to have to build into our thinking the concept of preservation writ large," says Cerf. (Unless of course the world ends up taken over by robots.)