Call me outdated, but I’m not on a cloud, not even Google Drive.

Despite having covered tech news for some time and written about the endless potential of cloud computing, I just never got around to actually get myself that kind of backup.

My laziness finally came to bite me in the back when my phone suddenly died last week. Yes, yes, I know it happens to everyone at one point in their lives but I truly had not imagined it would happen to me.

Or at least I wanted to ignore it because I had started to perceive my Galaxy S3 as a part of my body that would not expire before I did. I even secretly believed my phone was immortal. It once survived a dip into a hot cup of instant noodles. There was no way it could die.

Yet it did.

And now I am on the edge of my seat, biting my nails and waiting for the verdict from the after service people. It’s now in the factory and they promised to let me know if the data on the hard drive could be salvaged.

But first, they said if I wanted the phone back in a functional state, the data had to go.

There was nothing to think about. My decision was almost instantaneous. I immediately said the phone could go. The data, however, could not. You are the after service gods, I begged, so do anything and everything in your power to save what was inside.

We are talking about almost a year’s worth of photos of my family, and I broke out in cold sweat after merely thinking about how I would cope if nothing could be saved.

The lesson of this unfortunate incident, I know, probably should have been back up all my hardware.

But instead, I began to obsess about our dependency on smart devices ― a topic that is far from being new. Yet, it just hit me harder now that I had become a victim of my own vice.

The phone is a search engine, a photo album, a navigation device, the bank and a calendar all rolled up in one. It’s like a personal assistant who knows when to shut up. But because it is so helpful, we also rely way too much on it.

For instance, I know by memory at the most a handful of phone numbers in my address book. My parents, my husband and a few friends and colleagues were about as far as I got. Before, I used to memorize the numbers of at least 20 friends and acquaintances.

At home, smart devices can be a fantastic toy for your kids if you can limit the time and content.

But so many children are becoming so dependent on their phones ― 1 out of 5 kids from grades four through high school in Seoul City were recently found to be at risk of becoming smartphone addicts ― that as a mother I am wracked with qualms over whether these phones and tablets were making our lives better or worse.

As I mourned the death of my phone and grappled with this new-found sense of doubt about the smart age, I was forced to go phone-less for about 24 hours. To my surprise, it was a hugely liberating experience. No more Katalk alerts every 10 minutes, no checking my email and no Facebook updates to watch for.

Perhaps we could all each pick one day out of the month when we put aside our phones. Instead, jot down memos on a notepad, correspond with handwritten letters, and from time to time, reach for a real camera to snap pictures of our loved ones.

For my part, I plan on trying harder to memorize at least a few of my contacts and to really watch what my son is doing at a school play or on the playground instead of whipping out my phone to capture that on a chip.

This way, I would have a mental cache full of wonderful memories that no device could ever take away.

In the meantime, I need to get me a cloud.

By Kim Ji-hyun

The writer is business editor of The Korea Herald. She can be reached at jemmie@heraldcorp.com. ― Ed.