TO A few years ago, I was faced with an unexpected dilemma: there were only a handful of decent phone repair shops in New York, and even fewer willing and able to work on a 2010 Blackberry. There was no one who understood my situation, which was my own. had To get my broken and out of service phone working again, Because it contained my text messages from high school. That was a crucial evidence of my life..
For a brief, shining moment, the Blackberry lit up. I searched my long-lost inbox for little forgotten treasures: written confirmations of teenage heartbreak, perhaps, or records of lust, boredom, excitement, my eating disorder. But I didn’t find much. Mostly, I texted about schoolwork.
I never got it working again. It felt like a crisis, albeit a private and narcissistic one. The idea that this trove of material—evidence of how I felt, how I communicated, how my friends talked at the height of their teenage years—was stuck in a broken machine seemed tragic.
That particular sadness has faded over time, but my digital footprint has only snowballed. Every day, I generate more and more things that my older self would, in theory, like to remember: tons of text messages, way more than I ever had. An average of 75 are exchanged per day – as well as photos, videos, emails, social media likes, and metadata from my millions of Google searches. There are plenty of stupid memes from group chats or “I’ll be there in 5 minutes” texts, as well as the last messages my grandma sent me and the entire arc of a recently ended long-distance relationship.
I’ve learned from my mistake with the Blackberry. Instead of relying on tiny devices designed to become obsolete, I now pay for cloud services to keep everything in one huge, vaporous, overwhelming pile. For $2.99 a month, they preserve my 200GB-plus digital attics, including 16,000 photos, eight years of Gmail, and 44GB of iMessages sent and received after I changed my iPhone settings to “never delete” in 2017.
I don’t have this compulsion to save in the physical world, where I regularly purge outdated and irrelevant items without much thought. But I am sentimental and I can relate to what experts call “digital hoarding” – accumulating excessive digital material to the point of causing stress and anxiety.
Even with a less extreme approach, your digital trail is likely still massive, diffuse, random, and accessible only At the whims of technology companiesAccording to experts, each of us generate approximately 8 MB of data online every day, up from 2MB a decade ago. The average American owns about 500GB of storage, including social media usage, expanding amid the mammoth 328.77 million terabytes of new data generated every day.
Our digital storage repositories are getting bigger, more expensive and worse for the planet: the Internet and the digital industry produce The same annual emissions as aviation. Not to mention the emotional cost of managing your Cloud storage hell and storage limitsThere are more and more calls from Data storage experts and Journalists with financial difficulties for us to embark digital spring cleaning – throw away duplicate photos like you would old party blouses.
Most people, myself included, have a porous and understudied relationship with phones and the cloud. Dr. Liz Sillence, a professor of psychology at Northumbria University and one of the few researchers who has examined personal digital data storagehas found that most people don’t even know where to start with their data. “Do I really own it? Is it in the cloud? If I delete everything on my device, will it still be there somewhere? Should I make additional backups if I don’t trust it? This just adds to the data problem,” he said.
I know the confusion. I’m not a tech expert, nor am I particularly organized; like with money, I prefer not to think about the storage of my data, as long as it’s there and accessible. Every now and then, I get a surge of energy to get my data out of the cloud, in very home-made and unintelligent ways, like copying every Facebook message my best friend and I have exchanged since we were 16 and pasting them into a Word document. I’m easily baffled by the tech jargon and multi-step procedures recommended on various Reddit forums filled with people like me, afraid of losing bits of themselves or the Digital remains of a loved one.
One Christmas, my sister gifted me a subscription to iMazing, one of many services that back up your iPhone and export iMessages into easy-to-read PDF files. But after several attempts and countless hours of frustration, I gave up because I don’t have enough storage on my 2017 MacBook. For months, I dealt with my phone’s low memory by manually deleting photos from my text messages. Then, I simply bought a new phone, rather than risk accidentally deleting anything from the cloud.
Margot Note, a archivistHe said he has more and more private clients looking to preserve digital treasures, especially text message archives that capture “everyday history and meaningful moments.” As with physical letters, “you see how relationships change over time,” he said.
Part of this drive for self-preservation is curiosity. What were my best friend and I talking about back in 2018, when we were fresh out of college, full of energy, and on opposite sides of the world? How exactly did my ex signal to me that we were more than friends, and when did the relationship start to fall apart?
But the overriding feeling is anxiety. If I were to lose my writing again, I would lose the evidence of myself and my people. I would lose the few things I could hold on to after the death of a loved one: their voice, their evolution over time, their specific tone with me. I wanted to protect, as the writer Sarah Manguso said of her journal in her book Ongoingness, “my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I had lost it.”
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“Just thinking about data can make you feel anxious because you know you’re not aware of it. It’s an overwhelming feeling,” Sillence said. “Anxiety is a huge barrier to actually undertaking restructuring and cleaning up your digital data.”
There are risks to engaging with them, too. In her book The End of Forgetting: Growing Up With Social Media, media and culture scholar Kate Eichhorn argues that the Internet’s ability to keep us one click away from the past harms our ability to form adult identities, grow and mature. “There’s something at risk when anything can come back into your life,” she told me. “I don’t think we fully understand yet what the psychological impact of that will be.”
On the occasional occasions when I delve into my 44GB trove of texts, I often emerge feeling intoxicated by information, by longing for the past, by the astonishing march of time. I am also struck by the fallibility of memory, as the record does not always match my optimistic view of history. These texts are not really my memories, they are fragments of experiences frozen in time. What harm is there in forgetting them? What do I really gain by looking back?
Both Eichhorn and Sillence are skeptical of our need for all this digital stuff. We’re constantly accumulating data, Eichhorn said. “Is that an archive? Or does it fall into another secret form of socially acceptable hoarding?” Sillence suggests that deleting the data cloud could be a ritual, like filing your tax return: “Go through the photos from the day and just delete the ones you know will never see the light of day again.”
I like the idea of being more ruthless. I could start being intentional with my digital archive. I could prune it and delete it. I could dump data into a so-called “Application for the second brain” Designed as an external memory for everything from texts to to-do lists, Note, the archivist, assured me I wasn’t an idiot for not finding a good way to organize my digital attic — for now, there isn’t one. For institutions, there are powerful preservation solutions, “but they’re labor intensive and resource intensive,” she said. “It just hasn’t been applied to the personal digital archive. I think it will eventually, but right now there’s no solution that people just don’t know about.”
I’ll most likely wait until my cloud storage is full before making a decision, and I’ll probably pay for another gigabyte or two. My cloud storage hums quietly in the background – easy to set aside, present but not thought about. As with my old Blackberry, tucked away in a desk drawer, I feel less and less compelled to use it again, but it’s nice to know it’s there.