The “father of the Internet” has a warning for those who are getting a bit too comfortable in this age of worldwide connectivity: the dark ages may be coming.

Vinton Cerf, currently the chief Internet evangelist at Google, said at an annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science that he was worried about technology evolving so rapidly that many storage formats would become obsolete in a phenomenon called “bit rot,” according to a PC World report.

What does that mean? It means applications needed to read files we have stored in the all-pervasive “cloud” today could be lost forever because new hardware technologies emerging could be incompatible with them, and that many of the files would be rendered useless and completely inaccessible to future generations.

Cerf is proposing “digital vellum” to solve the problem, which would be a tool that would preserve old technologies to keep all files useful long after their parent technology’s shelf life.

Eric Burgener, a research director with IDC, said that a way to solve the issue was to “maintain at a minimum read compatibility with older data even as new technologies are introduced,” but “the devil, of course, is in the details,” according to the PC World report.

Carnegie Mellon University is currently working on a project called “Olive,” which would seek to develop technology that would preserve software, games, and other content.

However, because these tools aren’t mainstream, many have reason to be concerned about their data being lost, including companies.

Other proposals have been put forward. The Storage Networking Industry Association has discussed a “100-year archive” to address the issue, but that concept hasn’t gone anywhere yet.

The problem is that it’s still just a theoretical concern, not one that is currently affecting anyone’s bottom line, or one that could make anyone a profit. That issue is compounded by the fact that it’s a long-term problem, and thus there isn’t as much urgency in dealing with it now.