For me, I noticed I no longer had instant recall of various remote control buttons. Was a small thing, but until that time, I stored maps of buttons and modes for everything. Now, I sometimes do, but I find I have the general rules, and need to parse devices and apply them now, not just thought as action as it was before.
And on the subject of memories, are all memories information? If you learn something new in mathematics, do you risk losing the memory of the cake at your fourth birthday party, or only something technical you learned about archery?
Also, if what you are saying is true, you are vulnerable to a DoS attack on your brain. I could flood you with new information right now and, if you read it, you might not remember your mother's name by the end of it.
I've always assumed this was an evolutionary result of weighting memories based on their usefulness, wherein the most useful memories are correlated with their recall frequency. I.e. they are the most useful for surviving my day to day life since I seem to need them a great number of times.
Rather horrifying.
This does bring up an idea I had from years ago where instead of making prisons as boring as possible we make them amazingly interesting places where the prisoners have to use their brains constantly all day. The idea being that all this information will slowly push out the ideas and thoughts of the old person to be replaced with a new ideas and memories that make the person less likely to commit crime once released. The person should come out of prison a better person than they went in.
To recover old info, first concentrate on it and recall as much as possible (what you call "metadata"), and then simply cease focusing on it. Your mind will "re-hydrate" the archived experience in the background. Sometimes this may take a day or two, but usually it requires less than 10 minutes.
Reconsider the memory periodically: each time you should feel an indicator of whether progress is being made (even though the memory isn't yet fully recovered).
One of the good things about my memory is if I remember something it accurate. I used to win lots of bets (for drinks mostly) by exploiting this - people would tell me X happened and I would say no it was Y and would they like to bet on it. I was always amazed at how many people would accept these bets even after losing to me many times - it seemed they forgot that I had an accurate memory :)
