|
Ah, well, I'm (a) an old fogey and (b) a very conservative[1] engineer. To me, apart from the tangibility of being able to hold onto the physical product, having that original object represents a backup. I don't want to find myself in a position where my primary storage fails, or where someone else's idea of DRM prevents me using the material on another server/player/viewer whatever... I also want uncompressed audio, in the case of CDs; not the compressed rubbish that is peddled by the emusic sites. So I'll still buy CDs and books.
Neil
[1] A writer friend reckons 'backup' is one on the machine, one on the server, one in the pocket on a thumbdrive, and one on a different continent.
At work, I've been involved in storage for radio programme material over the last few years - terabytes of the stuff. We use big raid arrays, with servers triplicated and using more than one OS to provide access. Then we duplicate the room somewhere else in the building, with different power supply and network accesses. After that, we duplicate the whole building elsewhere in the city... eventually, we duplicate the whole thing in a different city. Paranoid? Us? We've never lost anything...
|