Cloud control: A guide to conducting a digital audit

We’ve exponentially expanded our personal archives online. But how can you ensure losing access to a phone, account, service won’t disrupt your life? Take a look.

The first question to ask, when it comes to protecting digital belongings, is a fairly simple one: What, in the digital cornucopia of my own making, do I actually want to keep?

The second is a crucial one: How can I ensure that losing access to a phone, account, service or platform will not disrupt my life?

START WITH WHAT CANNOT BE REPLACED

Videogames and films can be emotive purchases, vital to one’s sense of self or even one’s work, but chances are they can be accessed elsewhere. There are some things, on the other hand, that exist nowhere else but with you: family photographs and videos, work product, correspondence, legal documents, financial records, creative work.

Start here.

The danger, with digital abundance, is that we save everything and curate nothing.

I think of it as the Wedding Album Paradox. We spend heavily to produce extensive records, revisit them for a few weeks, then consign them to storage and more or less forget they’re there.

We do this at scale now, building proud archives of 10,000 photographs with filenames such as IMG_4387.

It constitutes real risk to treat all of it with the same degree of nonchalance.

Choose the things that matter. Organise them in ways that make sense. And…

DIVERSIFY, DIVERSIFY, DIVERSIFY

Important material should not exist in only one place. Create true backup that will let you recover something after it has disappeared from the original source.

Don’t ask “cloud or local”. For important material, choose cloud and local.

Keep some things physical too. Photographs, documents, contracts and work product deserve to live offline as well.

Yes, a print can fade, tear or burn. Its advantage is simply that it fails differently. It does not require a password, a subscription, compatible software or a functioning server.

The digital copy can protect against damage to the print. The print can protect against some failures of a digital system.

EXPORT BEFORE YOU HAVE TO

Many large platforms allow users to download files, digital copies and data. Do this while the service is healthy and the password still active.

Pressing “Download my data” is not the end of this exercise. Curate, save, verify.

Can another application open the files? Does exported material retain details such as sender, recipient and timestamp?

There is a difference between preserving data and preserving something one can actually use.

MOVE, WHILE YOU CAN

The longer one wants something to survive, the less one should depend on an aging piece of software (or hardware). Periodically move important files from ageing storage to newer storage, for instance, to ensure the archive stays updated as formats and technologies change.

Once one has curated and consolidated, this becomes easier.

Think of them like fixed deposits in a bank. Every few years, check in, redo the terms, and make sure they’re as safe as you think they are.

PLAN FOR THE ORDINARY FAILURES

Not every loss begins with a service being withdrawn. Sometimes the failure is a forgotten password, a changed phone number, or two-factor authentication still linked to a device one no longer owns.

Check recovery details on important accounts. Try to consolidate in ways that ensure CAMS investments statements aren’t still being sent to an email ID set up in college, whose password is the name of a favourite actor (but you no longer remember which one).

MAKE THE TIME

Individuals can only do so much themselves. We don’t all carry within us the debris of an archivist.

Companies will hopefully begin to provide usable exports, meaningful notice before shutting services, and sensible end-of-life arrangements.

Until then, protect what is yours. Ask what you would grab if servers were going down tomorrow. Make sure it exists independently. Preserve enough context to understand it later.

Don’t end up locked out of parts of your own life.

There are those who worry everything they say or do will live out there forever. It is safer to assume, for one’s own sake, that that may not be true.