It's just data, right? Data is immortal. Make identical copies of it. Your digital items can live and last forever. They never wear out...

Such is the promise of information technology. Except that I find the experience often the opposite.

First off, I am now paranoid about losing stuff. I often ask myself questions like: Do I have copies of that? Is that backed up?

I back up all our computers but I have yet to actually install the data after a drive crash... Are my backups working? Is my faith misplaced? It nags at me.

I recently bought a new computer and moved all my data from my old laptop to my new one. Or did I? Did I miss anything important? My old PC sat here for 4 months without me turning it on yet I am nervous as I reformat the drive...

The fear of loss in a digital age.

I still buy physical CD's because I feel confident I wont lose a CD even as I feel its likely to lose the MP3 files from said CD. I still have the very first CD I bought in 1987, but when I move MP3s I am never sure if I got them all. How would you know if you missed it? Its just a few files in a folder... When you have hundreds or thousands of files and folders, it would be easy to miss one.

My gut tells me that lots of people buy and lose digital stuff all the time. Unlike physical media, downloadable media is ephemeral. Here today and gone tomorrow for a generation born and bought into plenty.

W hile I dont know if I have lost any digital data, I do know about another kind of loss: software I cannot use anymore. And it pains me.

As a college student I paid $250 for a student license of Adobe CS2. $250!! That is a ton of money -- for PowerPC Mac software. Now that Apple is all Intel and Adobe has dropped their support, I am unable to use that $250 investment. Do I upgrade or write off my purchase? For now its a write-off.

While the bits never wear out they do kind of depreciate.

I paid NVIDIA $50 for decoder software to play MPEG2 movies on my PC. They worked fine until this weekend when I upgraded my HTPC to Windows 7. Now they wont install. Should I be fine that I got my money's worth or annoyed that I cant use them anymore?

There are a lot of little software products I have bought and stopped using. Or software I cannot use anymore because I lost the account and password or it uses an email address that doesn't exist anymore. And they dont have tech support.

Since software is immortal, it creates the expectation that the software should last forever. A car wears out but how long should we get enjoyment from digital products? A year? 5 years? 10 years?

Is the very fact that I feel angst about this issue a sign that I am old and experiencing a generational shift? Live for the moment; If you need it later, buy and download it again?

Just dont lose the password -- or the email to reclaim the password.