We present a body of work undertaken in response to the challenge outlined by Harper et al. in their paper, ‘What is a File?’ [9]. As a reimagining of the file metaphor, we intro-duce the file biography, a digital entity that encompasses the provenance of a file and allows the user to keep track of how it propagates. First, we describe the design and con-ceptual work that grounded the file biography. We then report findings from two studies in which we (i) asked users to sketch out file biographies for their own content, and (ii) deployed a tool called Milestoner, which enables users to build their own file biographies across multiple versions of files. We conclude by drawing implications for new file metaphors and the actions they enable.