'Bitrot' will make our photos and videos inaccessible to f uturegenerations
When teenagers take selfie photos at parties, they’re far too busy having a good time to worry about whether their great-grandchildren will be able to open them. But as we get older, making sure our precious digital content outlives us becomes more urgent. We don’t want our photos and videos trapped in time.
It’s not a new problem, as anyone with piles of unplayable VHS cassettes and unreadable floppy discs will know. Nobody is more worried about this digital decay than Vint Cerf a vice president at Google and the company’s Chief Internet Evangelist.
In February, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science that we face a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century”. He used the phrase “bit rot” to describe the process of existing content becoming unreadable by devices in the future.
Cerf said: “We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future”.
Often called the father of the internet, Cerf is one of the most respected figures in the world of technology. His warning made headlines around the world.
But is he exaggerating the danger? Digital flies actually last longer than physical objects because they don’t require a specific device to play. You may need a Betamax video recorder to play Betamax cassettes, but you don’t need a particular type of PC to open JPEG files.
The file formats most likely to survive are those that have adopted ‘open’ standards - that is, they can be used and customised freely by the public and software developers. Most photo and video format fit this description.
By contrast, proprietary file formats - those owned by companies - are in greater danger. It may be hard to imagine a time when computers won’t be able to read Microsoft’s .doc format to open Word documents. But if Microsoft stops supporting the format, then all those documents will be stuck in an obsolete format.
Perhaps the most important question is how long we should expect our photos and videos to last. We wouldn’t be happy if they became inaccessible within our lifetime, but should we reasonably expect people in 2115 to have the technology to watch a video we shot yesterday on our phone?
Cerf is more concerned about preserving culturally significant artefacts than photos of your grandchildren. He is advocating a process called ‘digital vellum’, which takes a ‘digital snapshot’ of software and hardware that can be recreated in the future.
That’s a long-term, hi-tech solution for academic institutions and museums. But Cerf also has a more low-tech solution for the general public: “If there are photos you really care about, print them out”.
It’s impossible to know whether your descendents will be able to open your files. There will always be money to be made in selling software and devices that rescue old formats, but not all technology can be easily resurrected. The answer, for now, remains frustratingly vague. Make sure you save your most cherished content in as many forms as possible, both physical and digital. You should also do your best to stay informed about the impending death of certain formats. The earlier you read the tech obituaries, the sooner you can transfer your content to a more durable format.
The fact:
- Coogle's Vint Cerf warned that future generations may not be able to open today's digital content, such as photos and emails
- He advocates a process called 'digital vellum' to preserve digital content
- Open file formats are more likely to remain playable than proprietary formats