In the internet age I find myself collecting so much virtual crap it’s becoming overwhelming.  I collect bookmarks, many of which now lead to non-existent sites, electronic documents that I’ll never read again, digital photos that will never see the light of day, fragments of code, whole codebases for ancient projects, notes and todo lists that I never gave a useful name, the list goes on and on.

Have we moved from accumulating ’stuff’ in our houses, such as mail, catalogs, brochures, leaflets etc to the virtual equivalent.  At least with tangible things we knew when the piles were getting to extreme levels and could have a spring clean.  Do people spring clean their virtual collections? 

I’m sick of worrying about migrating my data with me all the time.  I have ancient email that I can no longer read, old format files that mean something to me, like my final year university project writeup, that I just don’t know what to do with.  At least paper feels like it could last our lifetime - I have old CDs that I archived data on that are no longer readable.

What are we meant to do with all this stuff - just throw it away into the electronic ether?  Has information overload caused us to stop caring about our data?