Jul. 30--Let's jump ahead 50 years. Imagine your grandchildren are rummaging around in your attic, looking through old boxes and trunks. They discover laptops, hard drives wrapped in cloth, DVDs, and maybe even a real antique: A floppy disk.

What will become of all the data you've stored on these devices? Will any of them still work? Will your heirs have any devices that will allow them to read these treasures?

Here's the really big question: Have you ever once even stopped to think about this scenario? If you're like me, the answer is a resounding, "Nope." For all but a few, the issue of how to maintain personal digital archives is nowhere on the radar.

"I think there is a sense of collective denial," said Bill LeFurgy, project manager for digital initiatives at the Library of Congress. "I don't think it's really penetrated the consciousness of the typical computer user."

Chalk it up, in part, to human nature. We're lazy. Or worse, naive. There is a widespread, and mistaken, belief that because information is being stored in digital form on a device or in the "cloud," it will endure. In fact, the opposite is true. For a host of reasons, our digital data is even more vulnerable than paper.

Here is where I wish I could say, "Fortunately, there are a host of solutions coming onto the market that aim to solve this issue." But I can't. Because there isn't.

Don't take my word for it. Let's hear from Cathy Marshall, a senior researcher

at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley. Marshall has spent years studying the issue of digital personal archiving and what a miserable job we're doing of it.

"People are really disappointed that I don't say, 'Here's what you do,' " Marshall said. "Because there's not an easy solution. And I don't think there's ever going to be an easy solution."

Rats.

And here's more bad news: The problem is getting worse. Technology is enabling us to fall farther behind every year when it comes to our personal digital archives. That's because digital storage is becoming cheaper and larger by the day. So we remain stuck in our default mode of saving everything over the short term at the risk of losing everything in the long term.

"You can't ignore the dynamic of capacity growth in this industry," said Drew Meyer, director of storage at Netgear. "The mad rush of content generation and capacity kind of go hand in hand. It's easier to just buy a new drive and stick it in your machine."

If we were growing old 50 years ago, our houses would be stacked with newspapers we couldn't bear to discard. Today, we can easily become a nation of digital pack rats because, well, why not?

To understand the scope of the problem and what's at stake, take a typical, lazy consumer who is headed toward unspeakable disaster if he doesn't change his habits: Me.