Sure, you've backed up your data to an online service or external drive, but will that really be enough to ensure that your most valued digital data can be accessed years from now?

A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign assistant professor is sounding a warning that more thought needs to be put into preserving our increasingly digitized data in light light of shifting document management and other software platforms (think WordPerfect and floppy disks).

Jerome P. McDonough, who teaches at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says there are 369 exabytes worth of data, and that includes some pretty hard to replace stuff, including tax files, email and photos.

"If we can't keep today's information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture," ," McDonough said in a statement. "Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date."

While McDonough doesn't have all the answers when it comes to developing a digital data preservation strategy, he says researchers, government and industry need to come up with a multi-faceted way to migrate data and old software programs to new and sustainable formats. Open source software could play a big role in this, he says.There has already been much debate in the software industry, as highlighted by Microsoft and the Open Document Format tussle, regarding standardization around common document types.

"Reliance on open standards is certainly a huge part, but it's not the only part," he said. "If we want information to survive, we really need to avoid formats that depend on a particular media type. Commercial DVDs that employ protection schemes make it impossible for libraries to legally transfer the content to new media. When the old media dies, the information dies with it."

Brazil, the Netherlands and Norway are examples of countries that have already required government use of non-proprietary file formats.

Of course many organizations have at least started to think about preserving digital data, including email, in light of compliance regulations. And they've learned there can be a high cost to retrofitting their systems and to recovering data thought to be long lost.