The future of our personal digital memories: it’s time to start thinking about it

This paper deals with the issue of personal digital archives, reflecting on the consequences that digital technology will have on this kind of archives and trying to imagine what their future may be. The author is researching the issue about records media. In the past in personal archives there were mainly analogue documents (mostly paper), in present time we can find documents recorded on storage media such as floppy disks, optical media, USB sticks, hard disks (some of which are already obsolete and difficult to read). An increasing part of those documents are stored on cloud services (like Dropbox or Gdrive) whose access is protected by authentication methods and usually nobody shares their credentials with other people. The author is researching the following questions: in ten or twenty years or more, will we still be able to access these archives? What future awaits them? Will personal archives still exist? In this paper he is trying to answer how to address these issues.