What We Leave Behind
Today’s Version of the Augean Stables
After my mother passed away, two years after my father, she didn’t leave much paper behind for us children to sort through. A few shoeboxes of receipts, tax returns and letters, a box or two of photographs. Some people, I imagine, leave a good deal more, depending on their ability to organize and discard paperwork. But unless the person was a compulsive letter-writer or pack rat, I doubt the task for most families is burdensome.
This next generation, however, will find the task Herculean. Memory storage for hard drives has reached the terabyte range. And with prices low—you can purchase a 15TB drive for around $500, cheaper than most smartphones—people are hoarding more photos, videos and documents than ever. To put this into perspective, 15TB can contain 7500 hours of high-resolution video, 3.7 million high-res photos or 15 million e-books. If this were in physical form, forget shoeboxes. You’d need about 400 40-foot shipping containers.
I consider myself a highly organized person. As an example, my pastel box. Over 400 pastels are sorted by hue, color temperature, value and degree of hardness, and when I paint, I make sure to wipe off each stick and place it precisely in its proper spot. (I really admire those artists who toss their pastels into random piles and don’t seem to fret over it.) But what about my data?
I’ve kept the contents of my hard drive as organized as possible—folder nested within folder like those Russian Matryoshka dolls—yet chaos creep has been steady. It’s not just photos, videos and music, it’s also earlier versions of books and articles I’ve written; I save them all, just in case I have to retreat to a previous state. (I also own three different backup drives that I rotate.) And then there are random items I’ve saved, such as a web page I found on some aspect of family history, a scan of a love letter my father wrote to my mother, or a copy of some software package that has been abandoned by its maker but possibly needed again.
Who’s going to deal with it when I’m gone? If I die before my partner, what then? In my will, I’ve made her what’s called a Digital Executor so she’ll have access to all my passwords and accounts. But that won’t save her—she’ll still have terabytes of data, both the good, the bad and the ugly, to sift through. I hope her first priority will be to gain access to financial data and secure it.
As for all the other stuff, well, she can just take the hard drives and stick them in a shoebox for the next person. They should fit.