My family recently went back to hand-written notes, no e-mail and updating our checkbook ledger by hand. This move wasn't by choice. Our home computer either caught a virus or its hard drive went bad. So we've been without home Internet access for a week now.

Being forced to return to the old way of life reminded me how paper or hard documents are unmistakably on the decline.

For example, my son, the 3-year-old daredevil, broke his leg in December and during one visit to the orthopedic clinic, I was stunned to see not a hard film X-ray but the image of his leg on a high-resolution computer screen. The hospital had digitized the image, storing it in his records.

But digitization can create all kinds of other problems. Just ask one of the city's foremost experts on record storage and collection.

"Anytime you capture reality, you create a record; and that can mean it is captured in many different ways," says Frank Albi, chief executive officer of the Queensgate record storage firm Business Information Solutions, whose clients include the IRS, the local offices of all of the Big Four accounting firms and Procter & Gamble. "So that can mean keeping track of more records in many different forms, and a lot of people don't understand the implications of that."

Albi says 99 percent of what his company gets in terms of volume is still paper. But the 1 percent of the records that are electronic contain 258 times more information than the paper does. If you printed it all out and laid all the documents end-to-end, they would reach the moon 16,000 times.

Some of that information may be electronic copies of what is in the paper files. There might be a transcription of a tape-recorded conversation. Or a photocopy of a prescription bottle, which is considered a legal document as well.

That's a lot of information floating out there, much of it personal. Congress has tried to make it tougher for anyone to get their hands on it with laws such as the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act or GLB Act, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act of 1996, or HIPAA.

The two laws deal with privacy of records in the financial industry and medical industry, respectively, with tighter HIPAA privacy standards at doctor's offices, hospitals and other medical caregivers going into effect in April.

There have been some confusing moments, with some firms and offices overreacting - there are cases of hospitals not releasing medical records of deceased patients to their families - and others not complying at all.

And that still doesn't help those companies keep track of the sheer number of records now being generated, Albi says. Anywhere from three to five different copies of that X-ray may now exist - the original film, a duplicate copy for our personal physician and whatever digital copies there might be on the computer network at the hospital.

Another example - your checkbook. If you use a paper ledger, like I am now because my computer and its copy of Quicken are on the fritz, that is one record. The check is another. The copy of the check that the bank makes is yet another. And then the bank usually files those copies on microfilm, making yet another copy. That could make it interesting if you are accused of bouncing a check.

"If you ever are questioned by the government about anything, don't lie, because there are so many copies of things floating around now," Albi says.

Will we ever get back to just paper, or get rid of paper altogether?

No and no.

But the current hybrid system makes me long for the days of the three-color forms when you had to press hard to get copies. Either that, or the utopian dream of everyone with his or her own WiFi equipped laptop. Like either is ever going to happen.

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E-mail jpilcher@enquirer.com