Stephen Quinn, who teaches journalism at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., moves frequently because of his work. He prefers to keep the amount of paper in his life to a minimum and rarely makes printouts.

Quinn has a box in the bottom drawer of his desk that contains an eclectic set of storage disks dating back to the early 1980s, when he started out on an Amstrad computer.

All of Quinn's poetry ("unpublished and unpublishable" he says) and other writings are on those various digital devices, along with his daily diaries.

At some point, he wants to gather the material as a keepsake for his children, but he has no way to read the files he put on the Amstrad disks more than 20 years ago. He has searched unsuccessfully for an Amstrad computer.

"I have a drawer filled with disks and no machinery to read it with," Quinn said.

That is becoming a basic problem of digital life. Whatever solution people might use, it is sure to be temporary.

"We will always be playing catch up," said Rutenbeck, who is working at pruning his own digital past, discarding old hard drives and stacks of old Zip disks.

"It feels really good to do," he said, "just like I didn't keep a box of everything I did in first grade."