A generation erased: Why early digital photos are disappearing and how you can save them

If you were born in the 1990s or before, do you still possess your digital photos taken in the 1990s? The era when the world had just started to let go of the old physical film-based photography and started adopting the early digital cameras, might have been lost in the mix for many, and there may be no way to bring them back in the early 2000s. Those photos and memories, which were taken enthusiastically on the then-new compact cameras and stored on hard drives and axed online storage services, may have disappeared forever. Experts describe this era as a “digital black hole,” where an entire generation’s visual history was lost due to rapid technological shifts and a lack of reliable preservation methods.