Abstract
In private households, once received paper-based documents are increasingly substituted by electronic documents. In order to “get organized”, an individual nowadays needs to oversee a plethora of digital and physical information items stored at various locations. As a technological solution, cloud-based storage services such as an Electronic Data Safe (EDS) emerge as a home for all digital valuables. In this paper, we analyze how such an EDS fits into an individual’s information ecology by drawing upon the results of a qualitative interview study with 39 users of three different EDS services. We develop a typology of the content that is kept safe in an EDS, reflect upon the motivations and upon an EDS’s role with respect to other cloud-based storage services individuals are using. The challenges of maintaining a digital, personal archive are depicted and “data value zones” are introduced as a sensitizing concept to reflect upon problematic areas.
Pfister, Joachim