“It’s so many years of my life just thrown away,” Boldt told CTV. “The computer can be replaced. It’s what’s on it that can’t.” Unless an honest thief returns the precious files, Boldt figures that he can’t return to the University. His academic life and future career, judging from the article, are pretty much over.

Neither Boldt nor the article’s unnamed author mentions the obvious: That he has no backup. If there was a second copy of those files on an external hard drive in his home, on a server at the University, or somewhere in the cloud, he would have lost only the hardware (and the clothes, cash, and credit cards that were also stolen).

Backing up has never been easier; we used to do it on floppies. Yet Boldt has either never heard of the practice or simply didn’t bother. He’s paying a high price for that. And the author of the article apparently never thought to bring up the issue.

It’s really simple, folks. You should never have only one copy of anything, and you should never have all of your copies on the same machine. As long as people don’t get that message, or choose to ignore it when they do get it, more college degrees, careers, and family photographs will be lost.

The article didn’t mention Boldt’s major. Let’s hope it wasn’t computer sciences.

It’s not that I want to sound like I’m repeating things that have been said endlessly over the last decade or so, but sometimes there’s no avoiding it. It’s pretty amazing to me just how radically the production, storage, and sharing of documents has changed since, say, grandma’s time. I mean, really, think about it. My own mom, only one generation back, still has these heavy stacks of cardboard albums with sticky pages, cellulose acetate covers, and fading Polaroids. My dad has trunkloads of Super 8 films in condition I can’t even imagine. I still own a pretty impressive collection of cassette tapes. Yet none of these materials is getting any sort of attention any longer simply because they haven’t crossed the digital divide.

We just live in a completely different world now, with different rules. I think it’s important to learn a new way of storing and protecting the new digital documents. While it might have been perfectly fine for my mom to keep her photo albums on a shelf above her racks of mothballed clothes, that won’t fly these days. It’s no longer necessary for grandma and grandpa to fly over from Miami to watch a grainy video of their grandchild splatter around in a pool. Or watch slides of their children’s Grand Canyon vacation projected on a white wall. They can stay at home and look at everything on their computer, easy as pie.

So, if we’re ditching the cardboard albums and dusty boxes, what are good ways of sharing and (maybe more importantly) protecting all the digital content we produce these days? First thing you need to realize is that hard drives fail. Really, they do. And often. So it’s really not safe for you to keep all your files on your PC drive, and expect them to be around forever. You need to back up. You can do this several ways: get an external hard drive and transfer everything there. Upload pictures to a picture sharing site, like Flickr. Transfer data to an online storage service, like Carbonite. Basically, don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.

While you’re doing this you’re clearly increasing the safety of your data. But you’re not making it particularly easy to share your files with family and friends. You’re even potentially fragmenting your collection, with files here and there. Another obstacle to sharing is large video files. You can put them on YouTube, but the quality will suffer. Of course there are sites that allow you to send large files, some of which rely on Peer-to-Peer technology (like YouSendIt), and they’re quite effective. But they do have their problems: you have to initiate the transmission, a notification email is sent to your intended recipients and they have to download the files. It works, but it’s not easy to use.

Then you have other more elegant solutions, like home servers and other forms of networked storge. They can become a central hub where all your media is stored, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. There are no limits on the amount you can transfer. They can also back up your files periodically, and since it’s just the one device, you solve the fragmentation issue. But they’re not perfect on they’re own.

If you ask me, I think the best solution is one that tries to get the best of all worlds.

- Use a PC as you normally would, offloading pics and videos and any other documents as usual.

- Use centralized storage to automatically back up your files and make them accessible worldwide.

- Send your files to one trusted offsite storage solution. A home server device is nice, but what happens in a fire?

And that’s it. All your data is redundant and accessible. With a little bit of effort and some discipline, your documents will stand the test of time and look a heck of a lot better than my mom’s 1972 Polaroids.

If you had just two minutes to outrun a fire or tsunami and could take only what you were able to carry from your house, what would you grab first?

Assuming the family and pets were all safe, my first instinct would probably be to start stuffing hard drives into a sack. Especially the ones that contain precious family photos and videos.

But on reflection, I think a smarter move would be to run out the front door with an armload of photo albums and some VHS cassettes. Just about every memory I have from this century is in digital format, but those old photos and tapes are still hanging around, gathering dust and daring me to convert them to bits.

Those old-fashioned media collections, on paper and tape, are like geological markers that define major analog-to-digital transitions in my life. My honeymoon in 1996? Analog. Our 2001 return trip to the same Hawaiian island? Digital, courtesy of the Kodak DC240 camera we began using in 1998. Wedding videos? Trapped on VHS tape in analog format. Videos of our new puppy’s first bath in 2006? Digital, in standard def. This summer’s trip to see Yonder Mountain String Band in Colorado? Digitally documented in high-def, thanks to a new Panasonic Lumix camera that also captures HD video.

Having all that digital media hanging around has its advantages. In most respects, it’s easier to share today’s digital media. I can e-mail a photo or share it on Flickr, and I can upload a video to YouTube in a couple clicks.

It’s much easier to manage, too. Back in analog times, I haunted used record stores and built a collection of more than 500 vinyl LPs. The whole collection weighed several hundred pounds and took up most of one wall in my living room. My music collection today is four times as large, yet it fits on a single hard drive with room for all my digital photos and videos as well.

But with that convenience comes the risk of sudden, catastrophic loss. One hard disk crash can literally wipe out a decade’s worth of memories, including pictures that simply can’t be replaced and a music collection that would take hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to rebuild.

Which is why I’ve become something of a fanatic for digital backup. Every digital media file I own is stored on a home server, which uses  in turn is backed up to an external hard drive. I’ve got copies of those videos and photos safely stashed away on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Every so often, I burn those photos onto a couple DVDs and mail them to a friend for safekeeping. That way, if my house burns down at exactly the same time as an earthquake levels Amazon’s data center, I’m still covered.

Is that obsessive? Maybe just a little. But I’ve talked to plenty of friends and clients who have lost months’ or years’ worth of files because of a sudden hard disk crash. I can’t imagine losing all those memories, nor can I imagine how I’d explain it to Judy.