"As long as you keep your data files somewhat readable, you'll be able to go to the equivalent of Kinko's where they'll have every ancient computer available," said Schwartz., whose company has worked with the Library of Congress on its preservation efforts.

"It'll be like Ye Olde Antique Computer Shoppe," Schwartz said. "There's going to be a whole industry of people who will have shops of old machines, like the original Mac Plus."

Until that approach becomes commercially viable, though, there is the printout method.

Melanie Ho, 25, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been using computers since elementary school. She creates her own Web sites and spends much of her day online.

Yet she prints important documents and stores a backup set at her parents' house 100 miles away.

"As much as a lot of people think print will be dead because of computers," she said, "I actually think there's something about the tangibility of paper that feels more comforting."

Proponents of paper archiving grow especially vocal when it comes to preserving photographs. If stored properly, conventional color photographs printed from negatives can last as long as 75 years without fading. Newer photographic papers can last up to 200 years.

There is no such certainty for digital photos saved on a hard drive.

Today's formats are likely to become obsolete, and future software "probably will not recognize some aspects of that format," Thibodeau said. "It may still be a picture, but there might be things in it where, for instance, the colors are different."

The experts at the National Archives, like those at the Library of Congress, are working to develop uniformity among digital computer files to eliminate dependence on specific hardware or software.

One format that has uniformity, Thibodeau pointed out, is the Web, where it often makes no difference which browser is being used.

Indeed, for many consumers, the Web has become a popular archiving method, especially when it comes to photos. Shutterfly.com and Ofoto.com have hundreds of millions of photographs on their computers. Shutterfly keeps a backup set of each photo sent to the site.

The backups are stored somewhere in California "off the fault line," said David Bagshaw, chief executive of Shutterfly.

But suppose a Web-based business like Shutterfly goes out of business?

Bagshaw said he preferred to look on the bright side but offered this bit of comfort: "No matter what the business circumstances, we'll always make people's images available to them."

Constant mobility can be another issue.