This article is destined for social sciences, humanities and science researchers, in addition to general public: it is not a technical paper and it is understandable by anyone. Today the digital revolution is almost completed and information of any kind (texts, images, video clips and TV broadcasts, music and songs, WEB pages) is now recorded and disseminated in digital format rather than with a traditional media (paper, film, magnetic tape), with a change that concern all human activities of any type, both collective and individual. Moreover, also archived printed records are increasingly transformed into digital format, both for diminishing their volume and for having faster search procedures, while the new information is only directly generated in the electronic form. Besides those other recordings are also volatile by their very nature, such as e-mails or WEB pages, but they could host information of value in the future and they equally may deserve conservation. Starting with paleolithic graffiti engraved in caves, followed by inscriptions on stones, cuneiform scripts on clay tablets, texts on vellum or silk and papyrus rolls, ending with paper, ever information has been registered in a persistent form visible and immediately readable by a human being knowing that type of writing. But while a book or a letter can immediately be read even centuries after its writing, if its physical support has withstood the time passing, digital information has a shorter life, even in the absence of deterioration of the used media. That because of the same technological development that makes quickly obsolete any recording by irreversibly mutating both the reading hardware and software. Finally digital recordings are carried out in a great variety of different formats, sometimes incompatible with each other or subject themselves to obsolescence, thus unnecessarily complicating the task of preserving the digital document content. If humanity does not find the way and the will to preserve the content of digital documents, similarly to what was done in the past with paper documents, gradually the culture generated in each period will decrease until it shall disappear. A story without a future would create a future without history.