I save all my texts and photos. But do I really need them? | Well actually

A few years ago, I faced an unexpected conundrum: there were only a handful of decent phone repair stores in New York, and even fewer willing and able to work on a 2010 Blackberry. There was exactly no one sympathetic to my plight, which was that I had to get my broken and long-out-of-service phone working again, because it held my high school text messages that was crucial evidence of my life.

For one brief, shining moment, the Blackberry had actually turned on. I scrolled through my long-lost inbox, looking for little forgotten treasures: written confirmation of teenage heartbreak, maybe, or records of lust, ennui, thrill, my eating disorder. But I didn’t find much. Mostly, I texted about homework.

I never got it working again. This 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 in the height of adolescence – was stuck on a broken machine seemed like a tragedy.

That particular sadness has faded over time. But my digital footprint has only snowballed. Every single day, I generate more and more stuff that my older self might theoretically like to look back on: reams of text messages – far more than the average 75 exchanged per day – as well as photos, videos, emails, social media likes and metadata of my million Google searches. There are plenty of stupid group chat memes or “be there in 5” texts, as well as the final messages my grandmother sent me and the whole arc of a long-distance relationship that recently ended.

I’ve learned from my error with the Blackberry. Instead of relying on small devices designed to become obsolete, I now pay for cloud services to keep everything in a vast, vaporous, overwhelming pile. For $2.99 per month, they preserve my 200+ GB digital attics – including 16,000 photos, eight years of Gmails and a treasured 44GB of iMessages sent and received after I toggled my iPhone settings to “never delete” in 2017.

I don’t have this compulsion to save in the physical realm, where I regularly purge outdated, irrelevant items with little thought. But I am sentimental, and identify with what experts call “digital hoarding” – accumulating excess digital material to the point of causing stress and anxiety.

Even with a less extreme approach, your digital trail is likely still massive, diffuse, haphazard and accessible only at the whims of tech companies. According to experts, we each generate roughly 8MB of data online every day, compared to 2MB a decade ago. The average American owns about 500GB of storage, including social media usage, expanding amid the gargantuan 328.77 million terabytes of new data generated every day.

Our digital storage lockers are only getting bigger, more expensive and worse for the planet – the internet and digital industry produces the same emissions annually as aviation. That’s not to mention the emotional toll of managing your cloud-storage hell and storage limits. There are increasing calls from data storage experts and financially stressed journalists for us to embark on digital spring cleanings – to toss out duplicate photos as you would old going-out tops.

Most people, myself included, have a porous and under-studied relationship with phones and the cloud. Dr Liz Sillence, a psychology professor at Northumbria University and one of the few researchers who has examined personal digital data storage, has found that most people don’t even know where to begin with their data. “Do I really own it? Is it on the cloud? If I delete everything from my device will it still be there somewhere? Should I get extra backups if I don’t trust it? It just adds to the data problem,” she said.

I know the confusion. I am neither a tech expert nor particularly organized – as with money, I prefer to not think about my data storage, as long as it’s there and accessible. Occasionally, I’ll get a rush of energy to move my data off-cloud, in very DIY, un-savvy ways, such as copying every Facebook message between my best friend and me from when we were 16 and pasting them into a Word document. I get easily stymied by tech jargon and the multi-step procedures recommended on various Reddit boards full of people like me, scared to lose remnants of themselves or the digital remains of a loved one.

One Christmas, my sister gifted me a subscription to iMazing, one of several services that will back up your iPhone and export iMessages into easy-to-read PDF files. But after multiple attempts and countless frustrated hours, I’ve given 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 texts. Then, I simply bought a new phone, rather than risk accidentally deleting something from the cloud.

Margot Note, an archivist, said she has more and more private clients looking to preserve digital troves, especially text message archives that capture “everyday history and significant moments”. As with physical letters, “you see how relationships change over time”, she said.

Some of this urge to preserve is curiosity. What were my best friend and I talking about in 2018, when we were fresh out of college, full of energy and on opposite sides of the world? How exactly did my ex indicate to me that we were more than friends, and when did it start falling apart?

But the predominant feeling is anxiety. If I lost my texts again, I would lose evidence of me and my people. I’d lose the few things I could hold on to after a loved one’s death – their voice, their evolution over time, their specific tone with me. I wanted to protect, as the writer Sarah Manguso said of her diary in her book Ongoingness, “my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it”.

“The very thought of data can actually make you feel anxious because you know you’re not on top of it. It feels quite overwhelming,” said Sillence. “Anxiety is a big barrier to really engaging with restructuring and decluttering your digital data.”

There are also risks if you do engage with it. In her book The End of Forgetting: Growing Up With Social Media, culture and media studies scholar Kate Eichhorn argued that the internet’s ability to keep us a click away from the past damages 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 totally understand yet what the psychological impact of that will be.”

On the sporadic occasions that I do dive into my 44GB trove of texts, I usually emerge feeling drunk – on information, on longing for the past, on the stupefying forward march of time. I also feel struck by the fallibility of memory, as the record doesn’t always align with my rose-tinted view of history. These texts aren’t actually my recollections, they’re fragments of experience frozen in time. What harm is there in forgetting them? What do I really get by looking back?

Both Eichhorn and Sillence are skeptical of our need for all this digital stuff. We’re constantly accumulating data, said Eichhorn. “Is that an archive? Or does that fall into another secret socially acceptable form of hoarding?” Sillence suggests pruning one’s cloud could be ritualistic, like filing taxes: “Review the day’s photos and just delete the ones that you know are never going to see the light again.”

I like the idea of being more ruthless. I could start to be intentional about my digital archive. I could prune and delete. I could dump data into a so-called “second-brain app” designed as external memory for everything from texts to to-do lists. But Note, the archivist, assured me that I was not an idiot for failing to find a good way to organize my digital attic; as of now, there isn’t one. For institutions, there are powerful preservation solutions, “but it requires a lot of labor and a lot of resources”, she said. “It just hasn’t trickled down to personal digital archiving. I think eventually it will, but right now there’s not some solution out there that exists that people just aren’t aware of.”

So most likely, I will just wait until my storage clouds fill up before making any decisions – and probably pay for another gigabyte or two. My cloud storage hums quietly in the background: easy to kick down the road, present but out of mind. Like with my old Blackberry, tucked in a desk drawer, I feel less and less compelled to ever go back to it, but it’s nice to know that it’s there.