A few weeks ago my cousin and her children were very lucky to escape from a house fire that destroyed everything they owned. They literally had nothing left but the clothes they were standing in. If their house hadn't had a smoke alarm then things could have been much worse.

As it was, all they really lost were memories: photographs, old letters, tatty souvenirs from seaside holidays when the kids were young, pictures of my cousin's husband who died of cancer a few years ago. Things that mean something.

Houses can be replaced, as can fridges, stereo equipment, CDs, clothes, etc. Even if you can't buy them new, eBay will furnish most of the weird and wonderful things you might have had squirrelled away in your attic, including that glass tower filled with coloured sand and the plastic cow labelled "A present from Skegness."

But you can't buy back lost memories. Nobody's selling your old photos on eBay (unless you're Paris Hilton, perhaps), and insurance policies don't cover the real treasures, the things that tell the stories of our lives, the things that make us human.

All of which made me wonder what I would do in a similar situation, particularly as my own memory is lousy. I need external cues to remind me of my past.

My recent photographs have all been digital, and these are backed up regularly and stored off-site for safety. No problem there. I also have copies of all work-related documents, letters, code and so on, as any sensible business person would.

But there are some things for which I don't have backups. Photos of me with friends from school and university, going back 30 years in some cases. Letters, both sent (I kept copies) and received, to friends, family, to my wife.

Reading these letters is a more evocative experience for me than looking at old photographs, because the letters express my mind and personality at the time. I may inhabit the same body as I did back then (aside from the beer belly and a slightly receding hairline), but the psychological differences are huge, something that photos don't really relate.

What should I do with these old memories? Should I try to find a company that'll scan them all and convert them to PDFs that I can burn onto a CD or DVD? There are companies that will scan old photos, so that's one problem solved, but all the document management companies seem to deal with business papers only, not private correspondence. I'm not sure I'd trust anyone with my old letters anyway. And what happens if they get lost in the post?

Maybe it's better to keep things as they are. There's such a thing as too much security, and perhaps it's good that these fragile items are all that's there to remind me of my younger days. Maybe that makes the memories more precious than they would be if they were committed to electronic storage.

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