We all face storage problems, from where to put all those bulky winter coats on the first day of spring, to what mysterious foil-wrapped leftovers in the back of the refrigerator to throw out.

For most of those, it's actually pretty straightforward: if you don't like it or want it, sell it or throw it away. But when it comes to storing our digital lives, things can get a lot dicier.

In some ways, it seems like we are all headed for a collision with data loss. Even one of my younger friends, a photographer in California, made a strange data management blunder recently when he was trying to organize his Gmail account and somehow (he says it was because he was on his smaller phone instead of his laptop) managed to delete every email in his account. All of them. Yikes.

He's working with Google to get his emails back, but wow. Are we all really just a few clicks from erasing our digital lives?

I thought of this more after reading an email informing me Amazon Drive was ceasing operations at the end of this year, and there's the rub: we really can't count of any cloud services. We all say, "Sure, Apple and Google and Microsoft will 'always be around,' " but how many people said that about AOL in the 1990s? And why? It seems obvious. If you can't make money, you can't run a service. Giants like Amazon usually see it coming and let you know well in advance, but smaller companies often just turn out the lights one night and return the next day to find they won't come back on.

So what can we do to stay out of the possible trap of losing our digital lives? The first and most important advice I would give is just to be a more genuine person, one who values real things like children, memories, friends, and lives, and rely less on Facebook albums and Pinterest pins.

Do you have digital documents that are valuable to you? Print them out. Write them down. If you have to, store them in multiple digital locations, from cloud services to laptop computers to pocketable storage drives, and don't count on any remote services to store and protect your data.

I've already gone in to my Amazon Drive and downloaded, then deleted from there, all my files. Now, suddenly, is your last chance to do that, too.

 - TNS