Digital Overload

I realized yesterday that the reason I always seem to be tidying and reorganizing is that I not only have art supplies, writing projects and personal stuff to deal with, but there are all those computer files too…over 15,000 in Photoshop alone. I’ve been backing them up religiously ever since my computer crashed a few years ago—first on CD and now on an external drive.
There’s nothing worse than losing images you haven’t backed up—well, okay, there are worse things—but still, it’s an awful feeling when part of you evaporates into the digital void. You can always resurrect typewritten documents if you have a scanner with OCR software like mine does. But how to recreate a Photoshop file you’ve lost? You just have to start again from scratch.
The external drive I’ve been using is almost full so I had to buy a new one recently. Now I have back ups of the back ups! It took me most of yesterday to do this, and my head is spinning. The worst thing is I discovered forty or fifty projects I’d never gone back to and that still look interesting. My life needs a sidecar.