As any print journalist can attest to, there's often a good deal of interesting reporting, analysis or opinion that gets cut, left out or simply doesn't fit. For those occasions, we offer you Expansion Pack, an occasional feature that will bring you some of those cutting floor nuggets from the stories that we write for print publications. In the first installment of our "American Geek" column in the issue of Newsweek dated November 5th, 2007, we looked at why so few people properly back up their data. For today's Expansion Pack, we use our column as a jumping off point to explore the ramifications of that same issue within the world of videogames--and to help you figure out exactly how much your save files are worth. Intrigued? Read on.

Which is more valuable to you: A $60 console game, or the save file associated with that title after you've made it halfway through the game?

We've been thinking about this ever since we published the debut of our "American Geek" monthly column for NEWSWEEK. The first installment, titled "The Pain of a Lost Memory," attempted to explain why many of us fail to back up our data even as we entrust more things than matter to various and sundry devices. After an intro recapping our conversation with Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, whose hard drives can be found in both the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, we wrote:

If you've ever owned a computer, then you've probably had the experience of watching it crash and eat all your data. That's Murphy's Law for the digital age. Sure, losing the spreadsheet you were doing for work is bad. But losing your digital memories--the photos, the videos, the music--well, that's devastating. Yet how many of us actually go to the trouble of backing up those memories? It turns out that adult computer users in the United States (and our friends across the pond in the U.K.) are the world's most negligent about backing up data to external storage, with 35 percent failing to do so, according to a Harris Interactive online poll conducted for Seagate. Right behind are the Aussies, with 30 percent refusing to back up. The world leaders in data preservation are the Chinese (only 17 percent are slackers), the French (19 percent) and the Germans (27 percent). What might surprise you even more, according to the Harris poll, is that half the people who have lost data in the past still decline to perform backups.

Me? I'm not surprised by this news at all. I've been a tech writer at NEWSWEEK for 12 years, during which time I've had two hard-drive failures on my personal laptops. I still don't back up my data. I can't really explain why, because, like jaywalking in New York City or refusing to pay attention to the safety instructions before takeoff, there's no truly good explanation for it, other than not wanting to be bothered. That's why I cringed as Watkins and I discussed the subject. Even before I heard the poll results, I knew that I wasn't alone.

If you were to assume that we're similarly careless with our saved game files for our various consoles and handhelds, you'd be correct. Sony has made it pretty easy to back up saved game files on both the PSP (connect it to a PC or Mac via USB and copy the files over) and the PS3 (copy your files onto a flash memory device and walk it over to your desktop or laptop). For the PS3, there's even a utility that allows you to back up the entire contents of your PS3's hard drive to another storage device. Still, we've only backed up our PSP save files three or four times--none in the last 12 months--and we've yet to do so for the PS3.

For Nintendo's systems, you can transfer your Wii saved game files to an SD card and from there onto a PC or Mac (we've never done this); DS, on the other hand saves game data directly to the diminutive, easy-to-misplace cartridges, so any backing up would require a third party application. As for the Xbox 360, you can copy your save files onto a Memory Unit and preserve them that way. For some strange reason, we actually use a Memory Unit for all of our save files, but we've yet to back up that MU. We're going to take a stab in the dark and assume that, you, like the Level Up staff, don't back up your saved game files either. The question is why?

With the exception of Microsoft's Xbox, previous generations of consoles recorded your save files on memory cards or on the cartridges themselves. Today, with multi-gigabyte memory sticks and massive hard drives, we have the ability to consolidate a staggering number of save files on a single device. That's great, because it's like having a recorded history of our entire gaming lives. But if we don't back up, that history could become little more than dust in the blink of an eye. One friend and fellow journalist lost his PSP, and while he was upset about that, he was more distraught about losing his Memory Stick and along with it his progress in the supremely challenging Every Extend Extra. Another friend and writer, upon learning the topic of this post, volunteered that he'd lost a Gamecube memory card, and with it possibly his Animal Crossing town and his Super Smash Bros. Melee progress. For them, the games, and even the devices, are easily replaced. The same can't be said of their save files.

Returning to the question that we posed earlier--which is more valuable to you: A $60 console game, or the save file associated with that title after you've made it halfway through the game?--we're guessing that most of you would immediately choose the game over the save file. After all, the game has a clearly defined value--if you lose it, you'll have to spend $60 to replace it--while the save file simply represents the amount of time you've sunk into playing the game and the frustration of replaying it in order to catch up to where you left off. But is that the best way to look at this? As the cliché saying goes: time is money. So let's try to figure out the real value of your saved file in order to prod all of us to start rethinking our cavalier attitudes towards backing up our save files.

As of July of this year, the minimum wage was set at $5.85 an hour. So if the $60 game in question is an action-adventure game with 10 hours of playtime and you've played five hours into it, that lost saved game file would be worth $29.25 to a minimum wage earner, making the game itself more valuable. If this were a Grand Theft Auto game or a Japanese RPG, with 20 hours of gameplay and you'd played 10 hours into it, the saved game's value jumps to $58.50--it's a push.

Most of us, however, earn more than minimum wage. So let's run this thought experiment with the median hourly salary for 2007, which is $14.70 an hour. The five hours you've played of the action adventure game is now worth $73.50, and the 10 hours you've put into the GTA/RPG comes in at $147.00. Clearly, the median American should wise up and back up his or her saved game files on a regular basis.

Still, we're not convinced that this is precisely the best way to look at this issue. After all, the median salary covers a wide range of wage earners, from teens to seniors, and different age groups have different amounts of free time. So let's crunch the numbers one more time; this time, using the median U.S. salary as provided by PayScale in a series of age brackets:

Age: Under 18
Median Salary: $7.63
Five Hour Save File Value: $38.15
Ten Hour Save File Value: $76.30

Age: 18-25
Median Salary: $12.21
Five Hour Save File Value: $61.05
Ten Hour Save File Value: $122.10

Age: 25-44
Median Salary: $16.29
Five Hour Save File Value: $81.45
Ten Hour Save File Value: $162.90

Age: 44-65
Median Salary: $17.80
Five Hour Save File Value: $89.00
Ten Hour Save File Value: $178.00

Age: Over 65
Median Salary: $17.13
Five Hour Save File Value: $85.65
Ten Hour Save File Value: $171.30

Our back of the envelope calculations clearly demonstrate that in all but one of the categories, the save file is more valuable than the game itself, and ought to be backed up regularly in recognition of that value. And that's without even attempting to figure out the worth of any intangibles: the frustration of having to replay familiar levels and challenges just to get back to the halfway mark; the attachment that you may have built up to the character; any customization and personalization you did the first time through; the loss of unlocks, user-generated content and other valuable elements. So as those intangibles become even more valuable to us gamers, it represents a financial opportunity for Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony to create an online digital locker where our saved files and associated data can be synced on a regular basis, much like the Bungie Pro service for Halo 3.

After all, if Level Up's save files for Super Mario Galaxy ($61.05), Mass Effect ($122.10) and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune ($61.05) are worth a total of $244.20, we ought to be willing to pay a few extra bucks a month for the security of having them backed up on the console manufacturer's servers. An even better idea would be for all of the consoles to accompany server-side backup with a feature like Apple's Time Machine, tweaked to give us a graphical display of our progress through every one of our games and let us jump back in at any point in a particular playthrough.

What's even more interesting is that if our analysis is correct, it calls into question the rationale behind ever buying games at full price, because the real value as far an individual gamer is concerned is in his or her gameplay sessions, as represented by the save file. So wouldn't it make more sense to rent the game when it first ships, get through as much of the game as possible while backing up the data, then purchase the game once it drops to $30 or $20. (Please, developers and publishers, don't hurt us. We're just thinking out loud here.)