Do you know where your memories are?

According to a company spokesperson, 50 million people a year use Takeout to download their data from 80 Google products, with 400 billion files exported in 2021. These people may have had plans to move to a different service, simply wanted their own copy or were preserving what they had on Google before deleting it from the company’s servers.

I have many fears as a mother. My kindergarten-age daughter recently learned a game on the school bus called “Truth or Force.” My youngest refuses to eat almost anything but Kraft Mac & Cheese. Added to the list this year, alongside outside influences and health concerns, is the possibility that my daughters could inadvertently lock me out of my digital life.

That’s what happened to a mother in Colorado whose 9-year-old son used her old smartphone to stream himself naked on YouTube, and a father in San Francisco whose Google account was disabled and deleted because he took naked photos of his toddler for the doctor.

I reported on their experiences for The New York Times, and as I talked to these parents, who were stunned and bereft at the loss of their emails, photos, videos, contacts and important documents spanning decades, I realised I was similarly at risk.

I am “cloud-complacent,” keeping my most important digital information not on a hard drive at home but in the huge digital basement provided via technology companies’ servers. Google gives all users 15 gigabytes free, one-quarter of what comes standard on an Android phone, and I have not managed to max it out in 18 years of using the company’s many services.

I did fill up Apple’s free 5 GB, so I now pay $9.99 a month for additional iCloud storage space. Meta has no max; like scrolling on Instagram, the allowed space is infinite.

If I were suddenly cut off from any of these services, the data loss would be professionally and personally devastating.

As a child of the 1980s, I used to have physical constraints on how many photos, journals, VHS tapes and notes passed in seventh grade that I could reasonably keep. But the immense expanse and relatively cheap rent of the so-called cloud has made me a data hoarder. Heading into 2023, I set out to excavate everything I was storing on every service, and find somewhere to save it that I had control over. As I grappled with all the gigabytes, my concern morphed from losing it all to figuring out what was actually worth saving.

Data harvesting

I find nearly 100 photos from one November night 15 years ago, out with my family at a Tampa Bay Lightning game when my sisters and I were home for the holidays. We’re tailgating with a mini-keg of Heineken. My dad is posing by the car, making a funny face at the ridiculousness of a parking garage party. Then, we’re posing in the stadium with the hockey rink in the background, toasting with a stranger we sat next to. Had we bonded with him during an especially close third period? The metadata in the Google Photos JPG file didn’t say.

The photos transported me back to a tremendously fun evening that I had all but forgotten. Yet I wondered how there could be so many photos from just one night. How do I decide which to keep and which to get rid of?

This kind of data explosion is a result of economics, said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco that saves copies of websites and digitizes books and television shows. Taking a photo used to be expensive because it involved film that needed to be developed.

“It cost a dollar every time you hit a shutter,” Kahle said. “That’s no longer the case so we hit the shutter all the time and keep way, way too much.”

I had captured the 2007 evening in Tampa, Florida, pre-smartphone on a digital Canon camera that had a relatively small memory card that I regularly emptied into Google Photos. I found more than 4,000 other photos there, along with 10 gigabytes of data from Blogger, Gmail, Google Chat and Google Search, when I requested a copy of the data in my account using a Google tool called Takeout.

I just pressed a button and a couple of days later got my data in a three-file chunk, which was great, although some of it, including all my emails, was not human-readable. Instead, it came in a form that needed to be uploaded to another service or Google account.

According to a company spokesperson, 50 million people a year use Takeout to download their data from 80 Google products, with 400 billion files exported in 2021. These people may have had plans to move to a different service, simply wanted their own copy or were preserving what they had on Google before deleting it from the company’s servers.

Takeout was created in 2011 by a group of Google engineers who called themselves the Data Liberation Front. Brian Fitzpatrick, a former Google employee in Chicago who led the team, said he thought it was important that the company’s users had an easy “off ramp” to leave Google and take their data elsewhere. But Fitzpatrick said he worried that when people stored their digital belongings on a company’s server, they “don’t think about it or care about it.”

Some of my data landlords were more accommodating than others. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram offered Takeout-like tools, while Apple had a more complicated data transfer process that involved voluminous instructions and a USB cable.

The amount of data I eventually pulled down was staggering, including more than 30,000 photos, 2,000 videos, 22,000 Twitter posts, 57,000 emails, 15,000 pages of old Google chats and 16,000 pages of Google searches going back to 2011.

The missing

The trove of data brought forgotten episodes of my life back in vivid color. A blurry photo of my best friend’s husband with a tiny baby strapped to his chest, standing in front of a wall-size Beetlejuician face, made me recall a long-ago outing to a Tim Burton exhibit at a museum in Los Angeles. I don’t remember what I learned about the gothic filmmaker, but I do remember my friends’ horror when their weeks-old son, now 11, had a blowout and they had to beg a comically oversize diaper from a stranger.

The granularity of what was in my digital archive accentuated the parts of my life that were missing entirely: emails from college in a university-provided account that I hadn’t thought to migrate; photos and videos I took on an Android phone that I backed up to an external hard drive that has since disappeared; and stories I’d written in journalism school for publications that no longer exist. They were as lost to me as the confessional journal I once left in the seatback of a plane. The idea that information, once digitized, will stick around forever is flawed.

Margot Note, an archivist, said members of her profession thought a lot about the accessibility of the medium on which data was stored, given the challenge of recovering videos from older formats such as DVDs, VHS tapes and reel film. Note asks the kinds of questions most of us don’t: Will there be the right software or hardware to open all our digital files many years from now? With something called “bit rot” — the degradation of a digital file overtime — the files may not be in good shape.

Individuals and institutions think that when they digitize material it will be safe, she said. “But digital files can be more fragile than physical ones.”

Where to put it

Once I assembled my data Frankenstein, I had to decide where to put it. More than a decade ago, pre-cloud complacency, I would regularly back my stuff up to a hard drive that I probably bought at Best Buy. Digital self-storage has gotten more complex as I discovered when I visited the DataHoarder subreddit. Posts there with technical advice for the best home setup were jargon-filled to the point of incomprehension for a newbie. A sample post: “Started with single bay Synology Nas and recently built a 16TB unRAID server on a xeon 1230. Very happy with result.”

I felt as if I’d landed on an alien planet, so I turned instead to professional archivists and tech-savvy friends. They recommended two $299 12-terabyte hard drives, one of which should have ample room for what I have now and what I will create in the future, and another to mirror the first, as well as a $249 NAS, or network-attached storage system, to connect to my home router, so I could access the files remotely and monitor the health of the drives.

Getting all your data and figuring out how to securely store it is cumbersome, complicated and costly. There’s a reason most people ignore all their stuff in the cloud.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times