Dealing with digital loss: The risks of digitizing your life

280 Gigabytes of my life died this week.

My photos from Europe. My medical mission work in Haiti. Vivienne's puppy photos. Even my journalism portfolio, buried in a cold plastic brick. Stuck inside the useless Western Digital HD, and breaking warranty is the only way to possibly retrieve them. The Geek Squad quoted me at roughly $800 for data recovery that wasn't guaranteed, which is impossible to afford as a student.

Vivienne, my 1.5-year-old German shepherd, happily rolls for a belly rub while
I mourn the loss of my external hard drive, containing all my photos from the past 5 years.

The photos were the most devastating loss. I never expected the backup of my old computer to go kaput, especially as I finally finished clearing my personal data in preparation for recycling. The old laptop has crashed multiple times in the past, and recently has been struggling to boot and shutting off randomly. The external hard drive, I rationalized, was peace of mind for my failing computer.

If all else failed, I'd have my important documents and pictures stored away in a tiny, expensive cave of plastic.

Wrong.

I'm glad I'm no longer seeking a journalism career, because most of my clips (including a broadcast assignment that was due this week), are gone. I never dropped the darn thing, safely ejected each use, and had used it the day before its demise.

The sole survivors are the articles published online, stored in Google docs, and the handful of personal photos I uploaded to Facebook.

I cried. As I've been so relieved to rid my life of material clutter, why was this digital loss so heart wrenching?

First, let's backtrack to several months ago, when I decided to digitize my paper "clutter." After hours of deliberation, I selected the files I wanted to preserve and trashed the others. I scanned all the important physical documents (excluding tax forms), and trashed them once they had a digital counterpart.

 Every photo and document on my hard drive was a result of meticulous paring down of both paper and digital clutter in preparation for the "move" to a new, reliable laptop.

I am, for the first time in my dedication to paring down, feeling a sense of heaviness rather than lightness. Perhaps this is where my journey to minimalism dances at my personal boundaries -- after all, minimalism is merely living with what each individual deems enough, and nothing more. If my house was burning down, and I could only take what was most important with me, I'd grab my German shepherd Vivienne and that external hard drive.

So is it worth digitizing everything? Yes. But perhaps online-based storage resources like The Cloud and Google docs are much more reliable than external HDs. But if you choose, like me, to rid yourself of the material paper and photos and preserve them in bits and bytes, digital loss is a devastating risk of the modern minimalist.