Chapter 6: User Interfaces for Mobile Media 271 Consider a user of a device of a toolbox category, such as a PDA or a smart phone, which has 8 GB memory. The device could contain thousands of personal content objects (messages, contacts, photos, videos, music, etc.), as well as applications and their settings that are of high personal importance and value and which are collected over the years and stored nowhere else. Most likely the content is not backed up or synchronized frequently, even though people acknowl- edge the fact that a mobile device is more likely to be damaged or lost than devices that are stationary and stored indoors. There are many reasons for the lack of backups. First and foremost, no really usable layman’s backup solutions exist at the time of writing. And even if they did, these boring tasks are considered unimportant – until the importance becomes apparent due to some unfortunate event resulting in information loss. In a device ecosystem, the need for synchronization is frequent as the content is being enjoyed and created with various devices and – in some cases – by various people. What is important is to keep con - tent up-to-date between devices. For instance, keeping calendar and contact information up-to-date requires synchronizing between a desktop computer and a mobile device – supposing that this informa- tion is dealt with on both platforms. Archiving moves rarely-used content to a permanent, less frequently accessed storage, in order to clear storage space that is in active use. This means that the user wishes to save the content – after all, it is not deleted, but they are willing to pay the price that the content is no longer always accessible or at least accessing it is more expensive in terms of access time or dollars. The tasks listed above should be frequent and highly automated, in order to be useful and to minimize the inconvenience caused by infor- mation loss. In addition, they should be run in the background in such a way that they do not disturb the user or prevent performing the primary tasks. The device should also provide a notifi cation if there is a backup device and suitable connection available (and the device contents have not been backed up recently). The system should also provide an indication based on, for instance, the percentage of content that has not been backed up, instead of mere time. Furthermore, the system can inform the user of the possibility to auto-archive content that has not been used for a long time, in order to free some stor - age space. Once again, these notifi cations must be subtle and unobtrusive. A frequently needed task that is a counterpart of creation is deletion, which is the defi nite endpoint of a content object lifecycle; especially, if the object has no copies, backups, duplicates, or other versions