But I admit to some nervousness, too. At least with paper you don’t have any software format problems. Plus you know paper will last. Who’s to say what the long-term durability of DVDs and hard disk drives will be over the decades?

And I’ve experienced the problems outdated formats can cause. Remember zip disks? For a few years in the 90s that was my backup solution. Zip disks were great for a while, but pretty soon they were just a problem. My external zip drive output to a parallel cable, but after 2001, my iMacs all came without a parallel port. For years I hung onto an old Dell laptop, vintage 1996, so I could read the files. However I still had no way to get the info off the zip disks onto anything else since that machine only had a floppy disk drive (remember floppies?). Like most backups, nine tenths of the stuff was useless junk, but the other one tenth included the only copy of my book manuscript. So I hung onto the vintage Dell, afraid to get rid of it, even though it could only run Windows 98 (and just barely creaking along at that). A friend finally came to my rescue last month with a laptop that had both parallel port and a USB drive that I could plug my thumb drive into. Now the old documents are on a DVD, which I sincerely hope will have a longer shelf life than the zip disks.

Despite my trepidation at the prospect of shredding most of my old paper and shifting to digital, I feel like I have to take that step. I live in a small house, and twelve boxes of boring records are taking up space I could use for better purposes. So I’ll take my chances and hope for the best. Have any of you faced these format problems? How did you solve the issue?