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Source: Global Times

The Guardian, July 29, 2019, original title: I saved all my documents and photos. But do I really need them? I have always had the habit of saving personal data such as photos and text messages. I once went to several mobile phone stores in New York City to seek help in recovering the data on an old 2010 BlackBerry phone, just to retrieve the text messages from high school. Nowadays, I pay about $3 a month for cloud service, and all the information on my phone is uploaded to the cloud. I also like to go to the cloud from time to time to look up the old photos and text messages and other content for "nostalgia". Maybe not everyone saves all photos and text messages like me or keeps all digital memories, but my personal digital life habit does lead to an interesting question: In the digital age, how should everyone treat the digital memories they have left along the way?

I have over 200GB of personal data stored in the cloud, including 16,000 photos, eight years of emails, and 44GB of iPhone text messages. I think I will continue to generate and store more personal data in the future, and I will have to spend money to buy more cloud storage space. The average person now generates 8MB of online data every day, compared to 2MB 10 years ago. In addition, the average American now has 500GB of online storage space. Massive amounts of personal data also require more and more storage space, and the cost and energy consumption of storage space are also increasing. Statistics show that the annual emissions of the Internet and digital industries are now comparable to those of the aviation industry.

The habit of saving personal data for many years is called "data hoarding" by some experts. Experts say that accumulating too much digital material can make people feel stressed and anxious. Indeed, as a "data hoarder", I save all my text messages and photos. Is it useful? An important reason for saving this data is "curiosity" about the past. Sometimes I might think back to what I talked about with my good friends when I just graduated from college? What are my expectations for the future? What did my ex-boyfriend say to me to officially start dating me? Why did the two of us start to quarrel and finally break up? And so on. To answer these curious questions, I need to go to the cloud to look through the past records.

However, the main reason I save all this data is because I am anxious about losing my past memories. I admit that if I lose these text messages, I will lose the "evidence" of my past life and the "evidence" of my communication with others. Moreover, if someone around me dies, if I lose the text messages I exchanged with the deceased, I will never find any trace of the deceased's existence.

Interestingly, I place a high value on digital memories, but I don’t really care about preserving physical objects in real life. In fact, I tend to throw away old and useless things without a second thought. I wonder if this habit of valuing digital memories over physical objects is common among other people?

I am not a technical person. When there was no cloud, I tried to use software tools to back up my personal data by myself according to the methods introduced in online forums. As a result, I was quite embarrassed and the effect was not good. Most people are actually like me, who are not very good at data and cloud technology.

As one of the few experts who study the issue of personal data storage, Liz Hillens, a professor of psychology at Northumbria University in the UK, said that most people do not understand how to manage large amounts of personal data, including some basic technical issues. For example, some people do not know whether the data is stored on their mobile phones or in the cloud, and some people do not know whether the data is completely deleted when they clean it up, or whether there is still a backup somewhere in the cloud.

Archivist Marg Knott says she is increasingly being approached by private clients to store digital personal data, including text messages that record "daily history and important moments." Knott says these text messages in the digital age are like physical letters in the past, recording the evolution of relationships over the years.

Knott said that currently, as far as institutions are concerned, there are already good digital archiving solutions to store institutional data, but there are no good dedicated tools for archiving and preserving personal data such as photos, emails, and text messages. In other words, data archiving tools have not yet penetrated from institutional users to individual users, but I believe that personal tools will definitely appear in the future.

It is not easy to keep your living environment clean, and it is not easy to keep your digital life in order in the digital age. (Author: Adrian Houghton, translated by Zhen Xiang)