I’m leaving Malaysia in four months. I’ve lived here for eleven years, but now it’s time to move on.

So you know how this works: sell stuff you don’t want, pack the rest in crates, and shove the remaining in suitcases. That’s how you move.

However, I also realized that there is a different kind of move that I need to do in 2017 that wasn’t that big a deal for me in 2006 when I moved here: my digital move.

As  I have been cleaning out drawers and shelves, I’ve run across so many backup discs, videos, music, documents on so many various hard-drives, flash drives, and every other kind of storage device that I had to re-think how to do this.

Over the past ten years I have accumulated 10s of thousands of files and photos. I had so many of my memories scattered between different filing systems that my memories were becoming schizophrenic. Where are my photos from Vietnam 1997?  How about my eldest child baby pictures?  My writings from 2007?  Family vacation photos from Disneyland or Sabah?

Eventually I had to answer the question “Where the heck are all my memories?” with the answer: I have no idea. Here somewhere.

So I did it. I decided it was time to bite the bullet and buy myself a terabyte of storage in the cloud.

And yes, I love it. For several reasons:

1. These past two weeks have been a stroll down memory lane.As I pull photos off discs and upload them to the web, I have come across images I didn’t even know existed. Some of them remarkably precious. And the videos and the music. I have some great stuff here which has been buried underneath a mountain of digital madness. Now it’s all organized.
2. And that’s the second reason: organization. Every photo I own is now a click away. A word search away. A flip through a couple organized folders away.  Every piece of music I own is also at my fingertips, from any of my devices. It’s awesome.
3. Now I can share the wealth with my kids. All those videos we made, anyone can see them anytime they like. I can share my photo folders with my kids and they can enjoy and download any image they want or need a moment’s notice.

I used to ask myself, why spend money each year on a cloud subscription when I can just by a new hard drive. That now seems like such a silly question.

I’m on cloud nine these days. It’s a organized digital world that I can get used to.

I hope it’s the last digital move  I’ll ever make, regardless of where I move physically.