"We're accumulating digital information faster than we can handle, and moving into new platforms faster than we can handle," said Jeffrey Rutenbeck, director for the Media Studies Program at the University of Denver.

Professional archivists and librarians have the resources to duplicate materials in other formats and the expertise to retrieve materials trapped in obsolete computers. But consumers are seldom so well equipped. So they are forced to devise their own stop-gap measures, most of them unwieldy, inconvenient and decidedly low-tech.

Philip Cohen, the communications officer at a nonprofit foundation in San Francisco, is what archivists call a classic "migrator." Since he was in elementary school, Cohen, 33, has been using a computer for his school work, and nearly all of his correspondence has been in e-mail since college.

Now Cohen's three home computers are filled with tens of thousands of photos, songs, video clips and correspondence.

Over the years, Cohen, who moonlights as a computer fix-it man, has continually transferred important files to ever newer computers and storage formats like CDs and DVDs. "I'll just keep moving forward with the stuff I'm sentimental about," he said.

Yet Cohen said he had noticed that some of his CDs, especially the rewritable variety, are already beginning to degrade. "About a year and a half ago they started to deteriorate and become unreadable," he said.

And of course, migration works only if the data can be found, and with ever more capacious hard drives, even that can be a problem.

"Some people are saying digital data will disappear not by being destroyed but by being lost," Rutenbeck said. "It's one thing to find the photo album of your trip to Hawaii 20 years ago. But what if those photos are all sitting in a subdirectory in your computer?"

For some PC users, old machines have become the equivalent of the bin under the bed. This solution, which experts call the museum approach to archiving, means keeping obsolete equipment around the house.

Simon Yates, an analyst at Forrester Research, for example, keeps his old PC in the back of a closet underneath a box. The machine contains everything in his life from the day he married in 1997 to the day he bought his new computer in 2002. If he wanted to retrieve anything from the old PC, Yates said, it would require a great deal of wiring and rewiring. "I'd have to reconfigure my entire office just to get it to boot up," he said.

Peter Schwartz, chairman of the Global Business Network, which specializes in long-range planning, says that a decade or two from now, the museum approach might be the most feasible answer.