Have you ever wished for a backup brain–a device that could remember everything in your life from the smallest of details to your most memorable moments? Computer engineer Gordon Bell, a researcher for Microsoft Corp., is working on just such a mechanism. He’s trying to devise what amounts to a digital diary, a searchable database that contains digitized versions of nearly everything in his life. There are two parts to the project. The first is Bell’s experiment with life storage — capturing his papers, faxes, phone calls, photographs and home movies in digitalized form. The second part focuses on developing software that would support this type of lifetime library on anyone’s computer.