"It's like a fire. You just have to move on": Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving

Many consumers engage in magical thinking when it comes to the long-term fate of their digital stuff. A strategy that hinges on benign neglect coupled with lots of copies seems to be the best we can hope for. Yet if we take a fresh look at what real people do, it becomes possible to reframe personal digital archiving as more than a battle with burgeoning file formats and media obsolescence, and a push toward trusted repositories—"storage in the cloud." I will discuss four pervasive themes of personal digital archiving that have emerged from recent studies and try my best to convince you that this is a problem whose time has come.