Vint Cerf fears a 'digital dark age,' and your data could be at risk

In this era of the all-pervasive cloud, it's easy to assume that the data we store will somehow be preserved forever. The only thing to fret about from a posterity perspective, we might think, is the analog information from days gone by -- all the stuff on papers, tapes and other pre-digital formats that haven't been explicitly converted.

Vinton Cerf, often called "the father of the Internet," has other ideas.

Now chief Internet evangelist at Google, Cerf spoke this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he painted a very different picture. Rather than a world where longevity is a given, Cerf fears a "digital dark age" in which the rapid evolution of technology quickly makes storage formats obsolete thanks to a phenomenon he calls "bit rot."