If you have lofty ambitions for your legacy

Why? Because it showed that Emory's Rushdie archive included not only the writer's papers, however also his old computers and hard drives. And there, on the slide, was the symbol for an old Apple Macintosh computer and in its directory listing was a folder entitled, simply, "My Money". And at that moment, if you will forgive the pun, the penny dropped.

Emory has been around since 1836 and has an endowment of $4.7bn, so we can assume that Rushdie's digital legacy will be preserved. However what about the rest of us? Until a few years ago, we were like Rushdie, keeping our digital assets on the fragile hard drives of our PCs and laptops and nearly never backing them up. At that time came "cloud computing", with its promise of ubiquitous availability and secure back-up, and the flight from the PC began. As we cheerfully embarked on communicating our thoughts via evanescent media just as SMS and Twitter, storing our photographs on Flickr and Facebook, keeping our email messages on Gmail and Hotmail, did we ever give a thought to how much of this will endure beyond our lifetimes?

But many of us would regard it as intolerable. Think of the pleasure we get from old family photographs or the delight that comes from clearing out an attic and finding boxes of love letters, school reports, our first exercise books and old appointment diaries. The contemporary versions of these personal documents are for the most part stored either on obsolescent PC hard drives or on the servers of internet companies, protected by a password.

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