Thanks to a couple of recent hard drive failures it has struck home just how dependent we are becoming upon digital media. What do we stand to lose?
In the last ten years digital camera sales have exploded while film camera sales and processing have dropped like the proverbial rock. Home movies are now shot digitally then edited and stored on our home computers. The recent spat between Google and various book publishers have brought to light the state of the written word being converted to digital media. The success of the iPod and iTunes music store, along with others, has led to people keeping their music in digital form (ok, for the most part a there are still a few purists out there who want high fidelity sound). Essentially we're becoming slaves to the digital age.
I cannot sit here and throw stones! I cannot remember the last time I had to load film in a camera to go picture taking. In the last five years I've purchased only two music CDs and my entire music collection has long been in digital form. I still prefer to get my movies on DVD but nine out of ten times I'll convert the movie to either an ISO image to store on a hard drive to mount "virtually" or to a video file to watch on my computer. In the past two years I've moved almost entirely to reading my books in an ebook form via software on my computer of smartphones.
The benefits of going digital are many. Collections take up less physical space and I can carry a lot more with me on a day to day basis. At the current moment I have around 1000 songs on my phone as well as 28 books and a few videos. In the past seven weeks I've snapped 203 pictures with my phone. I was not able to schlep around that much stuff on a daily basis just ten years ago, at least not with any ease! If I were to pack the Macbook up with me I could carry hundreds of times more digital "stuff" with me. Clearly I've embraced the digital lifestyle.
Of course the downside is that at a moment I could lose a lot of that digital "stuff" with a hard drive failure as what happened twice in the past year. I've become a big believer in having multiple backup options! As I mentioned in my last post I'm getting a large external hard drive that will be dedicated to nothing but backups and I'm signing up for a year worth of backups at Carbonite.com. I do not intend to be caught flatfooted again!
There is another thing to worry about with the move to digital media and that is Digital Rights Management (DRM). On the music front I think that the Amazon.com music download store did more than any other entity to ease those restrictions. The downside to DRM is that if for what ever reason the company you buy your media from (music or movies) decides to shut down their DRM servers you are stuck with a lot of content you can no longer enjoy. And it's not just the company you buy from that can stab you in the back, it can be the content provider. A case in point for me is with Amazon.com and their video download service. When it first started up two years ago I was a big buyer of their videos in the form of TV shows I love. Then there came a point when I had a computer failure and had to do a complete reinstall of the operating system. I was diligent in keeping the Amazon videos on a second hard drive so I didn't loose the downloads but when I tried to view one of them I could not. The studio who produced the video no longer allowed people to authorize their machines to view that content. That was the last time I purchased a downloaded video from Amazon.
I could go on and on about how you can lose your content. I won't even begin to discuss file formats and how one can be sure what can be played today will be able to be played in just a few years time.
It boils down to this. Be sure you backup your information both locally and off site. If you don't there will come a day that you will lose something valuable to you.
Sunday, November 21, 2010 at 6:42AM 