I am a pack rat. My closets are full of stuff, and I have boxes full of memorabilia in my basement. I have Rubbermaid totes full of pictures waiting to be cropped and put in scrapbooks, a shoebox full of notes to and from my boyfriend in eighth grade.

My digital life is eerily the same. I have almost every paper that I wrote in college backed up on one of my many hard drives; I have every article I have written for computer user group newsletters and music web sites, and almost every project I had to create for any job that I've held in the past 5 years on a hard drive. Every picture that I have taken on one of the seven digital cameras I have been through is stored on one hard drive- over 15,000 pictures last time I counted. I probably have every bit of email correspondence from the last 6-7 years.

I've had my share of scares with regards to all of this information. I actually lost a good portion of my college life when a hard drive failed. The main hard drive in my computer had failed - thirteen gigabytes of data was gone in a flash. It was under warranty, but what they don't cover is recovery of your data. You are responsible for backing it up yourself. I learned that the hard way. Data recovery is a very expensive process if you have to send it off to a company like DriveSavers or OnTrack. I ended up sending my drive off for recovery, and it cost me almost $1000 with the economy service at the time. Even after springing for the data recovery costs because so much of that data was important to me, they still weren't able to recover all of my data.

Fast forward to last month. I had learned my lesson and I had a good backup system in place. For every hard drive I have, I have another drive to make the first one redundant. This all happens on the fly, and I have it configured as a mirrored RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) so that each set of two drives just shows up as one drive and a second usable copy is made in the background so that there's always a working copy. Because I'm a pack rat, I have 10 drives that look like 5 in this arrangement.

My power had been out for a short time. When I came home and the power was back on, my RAID with all my pictures, my current projects, and the past three years - and probably the most important three years - of my life was corrupted and unable to be recognized by my computer. So, I separated the drives and tried to read the data from one of the drives. No luck. At this point I was really starting to worry. It felt like I was watching my house burn down when I thought about all the precious info on that drive. My mirrored RAID was supposed to prevent this from happening! Why wasn't it working the way it was supposed to? Why couldn't I get to those projects? Would I really lose all those pictures from my magical trip to Europe with my boyfriend? What about all those concerts I photographed? After much tinkering with several disk utility programs on my own, I was able to recover the data without having to send it off to a data recovery firm. It was a major scare to think that all those memories would be gone in an instant. Unfortunately, data insurance does not exist.

This latest scare has had me reevaluating my digital life and my physical life. I think I need to simplify both. I need to clean my house and my hard drives. So much of my life right now is tied up in "stuff". What I like about my digital stuff is that it takes up so much less room than those boxes and totes of memorabilia and pictures in the basement. With just a few keystrokes in a search box, I can find something I wrote from years ago or a picture of a family vacation. It's amazing how much stuff can fit in a small space - tons of photo albums, CD and movie collections, articles, and past memories and projects. It all fits in the space of a smaller hardcover book. So, as I face spring cleaning and a basement full of boxes, I will leave my digital life as it is and concentrate on cleaning my closets.

It's scary to think though that my life has boiled down to "Home is where my hard drive is."