I’m a nerd who works for a data protection and recovery company, so I’m probably the last person you’d expect to hear from on Valentine’s Day. The stuff I do isn’t considered romantic. You don’t hear anyone speaking of data in emotional, sentimental terms. And that’s a problem.

Before I make my argument, a little thought experiment is in order: Imagine you return home from work one day, turn on your computer, and discover that, for whatever reason, it had drawn its last electric breath and passed on to that great mainframe in the sky.

You rush the moribund machine to your local geek shop, where some person in glasses takes a few pokes and then tells you it's beyond salvation. It’s dead, and everything you had saved on it is now lost forever. Now, here comes the terrifying part: You didn't back up your data.

As you drive home, you take stock of all that’s now lost: Those pictures of your children eating their first ice cream? Gone forever. Those love notes to your sweetheart you’d digitized and saved? Adieu. Those emails to your grandmother you’d saved off of your server? Goodbye to all that. In one unlucky turn, years of deeply meaningful memories have been wiped out, never to return.

This may strike you as a tad overdramatic, but it happens every day to countless Americans. And the reason for all this heartache is simple: Many people still don’t really understand data.

It may sound like a silly statement to make in 2018, when all anyone seems to do is play with the latest app and Hollywood produces biopics about guys who started popular computing companies, but it’s true. Our technology may have advanced rapidly, but our understanding of what it is and what it does could use some work.

And no concept, sadly, is more amorphous than data.

Our apps and our software have grown so advanced that we no longer need to understand precisely how they work to enjoy their outcomes. If we want to truly master our machines, we need to begin by understanding our data in depth.