When you’re ready to get digitally organized, here’s how Uricchio says to start:

Take a digital inventory. List all devices that have images on them that need to be captured, and corral all important papers: wills, estate plans, social security cards, marriage licenses, birth certificates, medical directives, insurance policies, and important financial papers. Scan them. Uricchio recommends buying a household scanner to have on hand for documents, but not for photos. Scanners that produce the quality you would want for photos are expensive. It’s best to either outsource your photos to a scanning service ( like ScanMyPhotos. com, which I’ve used), or rent a scanner to save images yourself. Purge what you can. Scanning is a great way to cut paper clutter. But not everyone can go completely paperless, and Uricchio doesn’t recommend they do. Others don’t mind letting go. It often depends on their tech savvy. “The low tech or no tech clients are not comfortable giving up the tangible.” You’ll want to keep originals of the most vital documents, like birth and marriage certificates. Back it up. Have three copies of everything, said Uricchio. Have one copy of pictures and documents on your computer, another on an external hard drive, and a third stored on the cloud, or on another external hard drive stored somewhere other than your home, such as a safe deposit box or at a relative’s. “If the house burns down with your paperwork, computer and flash drive inside, having a cloud- based automatic back up plan is digital insurance.” Make it routine. How long the process takes the first time varies by household, said Uricchio. But, in general, once a couple has pulled together all vital docs and photos, getting them in order and digitized takes about one weekend. After that, maintaining the photos takes about an hour or two each year. Keep up with technology. Anyone who can remember floppy disks knows how fast technology changes, and how easily you could lose your memories to a lapse in digital migration. “Once a year, look back and see whether you need to convert froma last year’s flash drive to next latest greatest format,” she says to the woman who has two old laptops both loaded with photos that she can’t even turn on. However, knowing what to do is the first step.