Father of the internet: ‘If we don’t move now, we risk losing all the data we’ve created in the 21st century’

http://www.businessinsider.com/vint-cerf-father-of-the-internet-warns-of-a-digital-dark-age-2015-2#ixzz3SWcc29Vr

Last year, it took a group of hackers to decode some old tape decks from a lunar orbiter mission run in the 1960s — as Wired points out, “the drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them, and “the data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties.”

take an X-ray picture of everything that is in place — not just the picture bits, but the operating system bits and the application bits and the underlying machine description bits — and we take this X-ray image and we package it all up and hang onto that, put it wherever we need to, maybe multiple copies, hoping one of them will last maybe a period of time. So this snapshot idea is quite clever and it captures everything you need to know to reproduce the environment to interpret the picture. And that object, this digital object, is something that could be transported around [from one cloud to another cloud or another machine].