When you store your entire life online, you gamble with your memories

“When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by e-mail, people’s tweets, and all of the World Wide Web,” Google Vice President Vint Cerf recently said, “it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history.” Cerf has even coined a term for it: “the lost century.” “We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole,” Cerf warned. “We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is … those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised.” There are efforts to reverse this, of course -- to preserve the Internet for posterity.

In 2010, the Library of Congress famously signed a deal with Twitter to begin archiving every one of the network’s public tweets. The Internet Archive, meanwhile, has saved copies of more than 452 billion Web pages, which will be preserved even if those sites shut down or change. But while that may help humanity’s legacy, it doesn’t do much for the average Internet-user who just wants to nostalgia-scroll through old photos in a few years.