The easiest message to save is not always the one you will want to remember.

Saving follows convenience rather than value. The message that gets kept is the one that arrived somewhere with a star button, in an app you still use, on a device you still own, while the ones that mattered most may sit on a dead phone or a platform that closed. Your archive ends up describing your tools more than your life.

Every so often, go looking for something you would be sorry to lose and move it somewhere plain: a printed page, a text file, a photograph of a screen. It is dull work and it is the only work that survives changing your phone.