7 ms·

I really enjoy having copies of all of the content I consume locally. It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone. It's there when I lo

by ve55 6y ago

I really enjoy having copies of all of the content I consume locally. It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone. It's there when I lose Internet, it is there if I stop paying for various subscriptions, and it is there even if companies receive takedown notices, or otherwise just remove content for arbitrary reasons with no transparency or warning. It's sad how difficult it is becoming for users to actually own any of their own files. We don't own our music, we use spotify. We don't own our videos, we use Youtube. We don't even own the things we write ourselves, we use Twitter, Medium, Facebook, Discord, and more, and as of more recently, we sometimes do not even own hardware that we purchase ourselves (far too many examples)! youtube-dl being taken down today due to DMCA is a great showcase in how user-hostile the end-game here may actually be: you cannot own anything yourself, and must only access it on the terms of many very large parties (corporations, governments, laws, IP, etc), whose interests are not only not aligned with yours, but often completely inversed. You never know when your favorite content on the Internet may completely disappear. Youtube videos get taken down, github repositories and all of their forks get removed, sometimes personal accounts for services such as Facebook or Google are deleted permanently and with no recourse, and sometimes even entire websites and services go dark, whether they shut down, are deplatformed, or get DMCA'd. While I won't be able to convince most of my friends or family to keep their own files for all of their valued content, since it can be a difficult hassle for nontechnical users, I will continue to do so myself until I'm not longer able to.

titanomachy 6y ago
You could argue that you never really owned the music. You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it. Of course, this wasn't very enforceable in the era of cassette tapes and CDs, or even the era of hard-drives full of mp3s. And even just owning a copy was pretty nice, for example you could lend it to someone else, and sell or give it away when you were done with it.
- est31 6y ago
  That's the point. You owned a copy. You could lend it, sell it. Nowadays when the content store you bought your content from is closed, your content is gone. You die? Your content is gone as well. Account gets banned for some reason? Content is gone. Furthermore, data about you consuming the content are sent to the store. I don't want any of that. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matters-why-were-fighting-it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matt...
  - titanomachy 6y ago
    Makes sense. Copyright before digital goods seemed to strike a pretty acceptable balance. I can't mass-produce and sell a textbook that someone else owns the copyright to, but I can give it to my friend who's taking the class after me. The author makes a living, and purchasers gain a reasonable set of rights. How do we get to a digital analogue of this? The physical-book copyright system probably wouldn't work well if everyone had a printing press and unlimited free paper, which is effectively what computers have given us. Or maybe it would work fine. It's trivially easy (although maybe not legal) for me to download DRM-free copies of most ebooks that I want to read, and I still pay for them. Maybe enough people think that way that authors would still make a living.
- devilduck 6y ago
  There's an old idea that once you release something you have created into the wild it is no longer really yours, but ours. Copyright and IP have never really prevented artistic theft, just slowed the ability to make money using someone else's IP. However, when you consider things such as the success of "Old Country Road" where a core characteristic of the song was a sample not originated from the artist themself, you can see how copyright and IP law really don't mean anything in the world of art. Information still wants to be free
  - PeterStuer 6y ago
    In a world that is rapidly changing into tightly controlled presentation channels, banning of not tightly controlled information sharing channels, and ubiquitous AI backed bots sifting through any exchange in search of even the most farfetched resemblance and where spurious strikes mean tried guilty and sentenced until proven innocent, that point of view might be a tad naive. Information never wanted to be free. It has no will. The freedom was the result of many people willing to stand against its confinement.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - devilduck 6y ago
      I don't know why you felt like you needed to try to explain to me that information has no will of it's own, speaking of naivete. Perhaps you are familiar with the idea of metaphor? Additionally, "information wants to be free" is an old hacker adage, in case you weren't aware of that.
  - jkepler 6y ago
    "Artistic theft" isn't really ethically theft if someone has simply copied a work. Imagine a small village. If John makes an axe, and Jim sees it and copies it, did Jim steal John's axe? Seems like there's only theft occurring if Jim claims to have designed it himself---stealing some of John's reputation as the designer and first maker of that kind of axe. Doesn't the whole village benefit from more abundant chopped wood? Or perhaps from cheaper lumber prices? True, John now has competition chopping wood, but perhaps he's got an advantage as a designer and he'll soon specialize as a carpenter or tool designer rather than just a wood chopper. Couldn't it be possible that copying ideas and attributing the persons who originate them enriches the entire village---including those who came up with the new ideas? I find Christian philosopher Vern Poythress's ethical reasons why we should advocate for changing copyright laws to be insightful and persuasive... and I learned the axe inventor example from his article, https://frame-poythress.org/copyrights-and-copying-why-the-laws-should-be-changed/ https://frame-poythress.org/copyrights-and-copying-why-the-l....
- core-questions 6y ago
  Owned is the wrong word, then. Possessed is probably a better term.
  - not2b 6y ago
    In the US we have the first-sale doctrine. So you own your copy. You can sell your copy of a book or a CD, even though the publisher might like to prevent that.
- musicale 6y ago
  > You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it. In the US, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 explicitly legalized personal and noncommercial copying (e.g. mix tapes) and established a tape tax to compensate record companies (!), musicians, songwriters, and music publishers. Indeed "Rip. Mix. Burn." was Apple's slogan for iTunes in 2001, and it seems to have depended on the AHRA (and "music CD-R" media, which included the tape tax.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple subsequently argued that iPods were exempt from the tape tax and made it hard to record music off of iPods onto other media. One could imagine an alternate world where Apple('s customers) paid the AHRA tape tax and Apple enabled easy "rip/mix/burn" across iPhones and other devices.
  - criddell 6y ago
    I think in an alternate world where Apple enabled easy rip/mix/burn we would end up in the same place we are now - with Spotify and other streaming services dominating.
coddle-hark 6y ago
> We don't even own the things we write ourselves This has been a big point of contention on YouTube. Entire channels being taken down because the licensed music they used contained samples that weren’t properly licensed themselves. It’s crazy. On the other hand, technology changes fast. A 1 petabyte SSD could hold all music ever recorded at reasonable compression. AI upscaling is making great strides in video compression. Most people already run a “server” of sorts at home in the form of e.g. a HomePod, PS4 or a Philips Hue bridge. Tech literacy is way up, too. I’m hopeful for the future.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > Tech literacy is way up, too. I'm surprised to read that. Is that really what you see? I'd say I see the opposite as being true.
  - will_pseudonym 6y ago
    My guess at the phenomena going on: The visibility of of technologically illiterate people is higher than ever. The number of people who are technologically literate is also higher than ever. The proportion of people in digital spaces who are technologically illiterate is higher than it was in the past. More people in the digitally connected world has decreased the average literacy level of that digitally connected world. But the absolute number of technologically literate people as well as the proportion of the overall population who are technologically literate has certainly increased. Is that consistent with your observations & experience?
    - jgon 6y ago
      To use an analogy to get at the point I think he is making, a bunch of medieval peasants reading the bible and nothing else isn't what we would call literacy. And I know the immediate response is that, in fact, those things are what lead to actual literacy, etc, etc. But the point I'm trying to make is that using prepacked apps, on a locked down device, in exactly the way the developer intends you to, to create content that you irrevocably license to the corporation that created the app isn't "tech literacy" any more than memorizing the bible and never reading anything else is what we would "written literacy". Most people use tech in an entirely consumptive manner, and again, we wouldn't call someone who can only read but not write, literate. A person who can't use tech to empower themselves outside of the predefined forms set by the companies that made their devices is not tech literate, even though they may navigate those forms with great speed and fluidity.
phkahler 6y ago
>> While I won't be able to convince most of my friends or family to keep their own files for all of their valued content, since it can be a difficult hassle for nontechnical users This IMHO is what should be a priority for someone - the FSF or EFF I dont know. The reason people keep handing over their freedom is often convenience. Free tools need to be as easy to setup and use as tools that take away peoples freedom.
- ve55 6y ago
  Absolutely, but this seems hard to attain. For-profit tools inherently have millions (or billions) of dollars to put into not only improving their UX, but also into advertising and making their product viral, sometimes at the cost of users (e.g. data harvesting). I'm not sure who really has enough money, drive, and talent, to be able to do this but with free software.
  - miki123211 6y ago
    Money is not the main problem here. The problem here is that, if you prize security, privacy, or decentralization above anything else, you must make trade offs by increasing some friction. The more centralized information you have, the better your UX can be.
    - boogies 6y ago
      To some extent, I suppose so. On the other hand, if you prize data collection or centralization, you must make some trade offs, including increasing some friction, as well. The less you seek to control your users, the better their experience can be. A tiny anecdote, with Jitsi Meet you can send a link to a meeting, someone who’s never used it before can click it, and they’re there. No need to set up or be logged into any account, install an application, or even find a small web client link at the bottom of what’s more or less a malware ad.
      - miki123211 6y ago
        If you primarily care about user experience and lack of friction, accepting both centralized and decentralized approaches as means to an end, you usually end up with something centralized. Trust me, as a screen reader user who often transmits high-quality audio, I know that a web client just won't cut it in more advanced scenarios. WebRTC implementations work... kind of. Sometimes. An actual app gives you much more flexibility and control, and makes the UX much better.
blitblitblit 6y ago
> It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone. Just make sure this stays science fiction. “It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
- throwaway9980 6y ago
  Imagine if the material being burned was instead the only remaining record of billions of hate filled Tweets and Facebook posts.
  - gostsamo 6y ago
    Sometimes we have to remember the bad things in order to never let them happen again. Though my country fought at the side of the axis during WWII, the government did not sent the local jews to the camps. I was at a gathering where a jewish woman who was a girl at the time talked about her experiences during the war. Truly moving experience that gave me much deeper understanding of the times, what people have been, and what they are capable of both good and bad.
dudul 6y ago
Same here. People make fun of me when I buy DVDs/BRs, but I'm too attached to some classics to take the chance that they'll be censored, removed, modified.
FpUser 6y ago
This is why I buy digital material I like and keep it locally with the copies backed up in few places around the globe on rented servers. Not hosting my source codes, software etc on clouds either. All on my own servers with backups/standby elsewhere.
conception 6y ago
This really hit me with flash self-uninstalling this month. All that content just systematically erased via the viewer disappearing. Flash was trash but it was a lot of the golden age of the net.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  Open formats and viewers live on, closed formats and viewers fade away. I've stopped investing my time and energy in the latter as much as possible. Shame about all that Flash content...
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    What do you invest your time and energy into, then? The "web format" isn't open in a meaningful way either when it's dictated by a monopoly, to fit their business needs in a closed ecosystem of servers at hardcoded IPs/certificates and a "browser" pretending to be open but overwhelmed with features to the point nobody can compete in the name of self-declared "web standards".
    - fsflover 6y ago
      > What do you invest your time and energy into, then? Libreoffice instead of MS Office, GNU/Linux instead of Windows or Mac, Firefox instead of other browsers, distributed social networks based on free software (Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfeld) instead of the monopolies, Librem 5 instead of IPhone, Pinetab instead of IPad, Pinetime instead of Apple Watch, Bandcamp instead of Spotify and many more: https://prism-break.org/en/ https://prism-break.org/en/
    - forgotmypw17 6y ago
      I've gathered together what's left of it and invest in that. Through much trial and error, I've figured out the bits which work in both Chrome and the rest of the 25 years worth of historic browsers and write for that.
      - 6y ago
svikashk 6y ago
> It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone. One of the main reasons why I download stuff (YouTube videos/articles), so I can always revisit it whenever I want to.
thayne 6y ago
> While I won't be able to convince most of my friends or family to keep their own files for all of their valued content, since it can be a difficult hassle for nontechnical users hey, it's a difficult hassle for technical users too. And the flip side of this is I don't want to lose all my data if my hard drive dies. I think ideally you keep your data both locally and encrypted in the cloud, but that isn't trivial to do.
- cjfd 6y ago
  Or just have a spare hard drive outside the house on which you backup the hard drive every few months or so. This is what I do to protect my media files.
  - thayne 6y ago
    which is even more of a hassle, and more difficult to automate. Not to mention you need somewhere outside of your house to keep said hard drive.

by ve55 6y ago

titanomachy 6y ago

You could argue that you never really owned the music. You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it. Of course, this wasn't very enforceable in the era of cassette tapes and CDs, or even the era of hard-drives full of mp3s. And even just owning a copy was pretty nice, for example you could lend it to someone else, and sell or give it away when you were done with it.

est31 6y ago
That's the point. You owned a copy. You could lend it, sell it. Nowadays when the content store you bought your content from is closed, your content is gone. You die? Your content is gone as well. Account gets banned for some reason? Content is gone. Furthermore, data about you consuming the content are sent to the store. I don't want any of that. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matters-why-were-fighting-it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matt...
- titanomachy 6y ago
  Makes sense. Copyright before digital goods seemed to strike a pretty acceptable balance. I can't mass-produce and sell a textbook that someone else owns the copyright to, but I can give it to my friend who's taking the class after me. The author makes a living, and purchasers gain a reasonable set of rights. How do we get to a digital analogue of this? The physical-book copyright system probably wouldn't work well if everyone had a printing press and unlimited free paper, which is effectively what computers have given us. Or maybe it would work fine. It's trivially easy (although maybe not legal) for me to download DRM-free copies of most ebooks that I want to read, and I still pay for them. Maybe enough people think that way that authors would still make a living.
devilduck 6y ago
There's an old idea that once you release something you have created into the wild it is no longer really yours, but ours. Copyright and IP have never really prevented artistic theft, just slowed the ability to make money using someone else's IP. However, when you consider things such as the success of "Old Country Road" where a core characteristic of the song was a sample not originated from the artist themself, you can see how copyright and IP law really don't mean anything in the world of art. Information still wants to be free
- PeterStuer 6y ago
  In a world that is rapidly changing into tightly controlled presentation channels, banning of not tightly controlled information sharing channels, and ubiquitous AI backed bots sifting through any exchange in search of even the most farfetched resemblance and where spurious strikes mean tried guilty and sentenced until proven innocent, that point of view might be a tad naive. Information never wanted to be free. It has no will. The freedom was the result of many people willing to stand against its confinement.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - devilduck 6y ago
    I don't know why you felt like you needed to try to explain to me that information has no will of it's own, speaking of naivete. Perhaps you are familiar with the idea of metaphor? Additionally, "information wants to be free" is an old hacker adage, in case you weren't aware of that.
- jkepler 6y ago
  "Artistic theft" isn't really ethically theft if someone has simply copied a work. Imagine a small village. If John makes an axe, and Jim sees it and copies it, did Jim steal John's axe? Seems like there's only theft occurring if Jim claims to have designed it himself---stealing some of John's reputation as the designer and first maker of that kind of axe. Doesn't the whole village benefit from more abundant chopped wood? Or perhaps from cheaper lumber prices? True, John now has competition chopping wood, but perhaps he's got an advantage as a designer and he'll soon specialize as a carpenter or tool designer rather than just a wood chopper. Couldn't it be possible that copying ideas and attributing the persons who originate them enriches the entire village---including those who came up with the new ideas? I find Christian philosopher Vern Poythress's ethical reasons why we should advocate for changing copyright laws to be insightful and persuasive... and I learned the axe inventor example from his article, https://frame-poythress.org/copyrights-and-copying-why-the-laws-should-be-changed/ https://frame-poythress.org/copyrights-and-copying-why-the-l....
core-questions 6y ago
Owned is the wrong word, then. Possessed is probably a better term.
- not2b 6y ago
  In the US we have the first-sale doctrine. So you own your copy. You can sell your copy of a book or a CD, even though the publisher might like to prevent that.
musicale 6y ago
> You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it. In the US, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 explicitly legalized personal and noncommercial copying (e.g. mix tapes) and established a tape tax to compensate record companies (!), musicians, songwriters, and music publishers. Indeed "Rip. Mix. Burn." was Apple's slogan for iTunes in 2001, and it seems to have depended on the AHRA (and "music CD-R" media, which included the tape tax.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple subsequently argued that iPods were exempt from the tape tax and made it hard to record music off of iPods onto other media. One could imagine an alternate world where Apple('s customers) paid the AHRA tape tax and Apple enabled easy "rip/mix/burn" across iPhones and other devices.
- criddell 6y ago
  I think in an alternate world where Apple enabled easy rip/mix/burn we would end up in the same place we are now - with Spotify and other streaming services dominating.

coddle-hark 6y ago

> We don't even own the things we write ourselves This has been a big point of contention on YouTube. Entire channels being taken down because the licensed music they used contained samples that weren’t properly licensed themselves. It’s crazy. On the other hand, technology changes fast. A 1 petabyte SSD could hold all music ever recorded at reasonable compression. AI upscaling is making great strides in video compression. Most people already run a “server” of sorts at home in the form of e.g. a HomePod, PS4 or a Philips Hue bridge. Tech literacy is way up, too. I’m hopeful for the future.

bergstromm466 6y ago
> Tech literacy is way up, too. I'm surprised to read that. Is that really what you see? I'd say I see the opposite as being true.
- will_pseudonym 6y ago
  My guess at the phenomena going on: The visibility of of technologically illiterate people is higher than ever. The number of people who are technologically literate is also higher than ever. The proportion of people in digital spaces who are technologically illiterate is higher than it was in the past. More people in the digitally connected world has decreased the average literacy level of that digitally connected world. But the absolute number of technologically literate people as well as the proportion of the overall population who are technologically literate has certainly increased. Is that consistent with your observations & experience?
  - jgon 6y ago
    To use an analogy to get at the point I think he is making, a bunch of medieval peasants reading the bible and nothing else isn't what we would call literacy. And I know the immediate response is that, in fact, those things are what lead to actual literacy, etc, etc. But the point I'm trying to make is that using prepacked apps, on a locked down device, in exactly the way the developer intends you to, to create content that you irrevocably license to the corporation that created the app isn't "tech literacy" any more than memorizing the bible and never reading anything else is what we would "written literacy". Most people use tech in an entirely consumptive manner, and again, we wouldn't call someone who can only read but not write, literate. A person who can't use tech to empower themselves outside of the predefined forms set by the companies that made their devices is not tech literate, even though they may navigate those forms with great speed and fluidity.

phkahler 6y ago

>> While I won't be able to convince most of my friends or family to keep their own files for all of their valued content, since it can be a difficult hassle for nontechnical users This IMHO is what should be a priority for someone - the FSF or EFF I dont know. The reason people keep handing over their freedom is often convenience. Free tools need to be as easy to setup and use as tools that take away peoples freedom.

ve55 6y ago
Absolutely, but this seems hard to attain. For-profit tools inherently have millions (or billions) of dollars to put into not only improving their UX, but also into advertising and making their product viral, sometimes at the cost of users (e.g. data harvesting). I'm not sure who really has enough money, drive, and talent, to be able to do this but with free software.
- miki123211 6y ago
  Money is not the main problem here. The problem here is that, if you prize security, privacy, or decentralization above anything else, you must make trade offs by increasing some friction. The more centralized information you have, the better your UX can be.
  - boogies 6y ago
    To some extent, I suppose so. On the other hand, if you prize data collection or centralization, you must make some trade offs, including increasing some friction, as well. The less you seek to control your users, the better their experience can be. A tiny anecdote, with Jitsi Meet you can send a link to a meeting, someone who’s never used it before can click it, and they’re there. No need to set up or be logged into any account, install an application, or even find a small web client link at the bottom of what’s more or less a malware ad.
    - miki123211 6y ago
      If you primarily care about user experience and lack of friction, accepting both centralized and decentralized approaches as means to an end, you usually end up with something centralized. Trust me, as a screen reader user who often transmits high-quality audio, I know that a web client just won't cut it in more advanced scenarios. WebRTC implementations work... kind of. Sometimes. An actual app gives you much more flexibility and control, and makes the UX much better.

blitblitblit 6y ago

> It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone. Just make sure this stays science fiction. “It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

throwaway9980 6y ago
Imagine if the material being burned was instead the only remaining record of billions of hate filled Tweets and Facebook posts.
- gostsamo 6y ago
  Sometimes we have to remember the bad things in order to never let them happen again. Though my country fought at the side of the axis during WWII, the government did not sent the local jews to the camps. I was at a gathering where a jewish woman who was a girl at the time talked about her experiences during the war. Truly moving experience that gave me much deeper understanding of the times, what people have been, and what they are capable of both good and bad.

dudul 6y ago

Same here. People make fun of me when I buy DVDs/BRs, but I'm too attached to some classics to take the chance that they'll be censored, removed, modified.

FpUser 6y ago

This is why I buy digital material I like and keep it locally with the copies backed up in few places around the globe on rented servers. Not hosting my source codes, software etc on clouds either. All on my own servers with backups/standby elsewhere.

conception 6y ago

This really hit me with flash self-uninstalling this month. All that content just systematically erased via the viewer disappearing. Flash was trash but it was a lot of the golden age of the net.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
Open formats and viewers live on, closed formats and viewers fade away. I've stopped investing my time and energy in the latter as much as possible. Shame about all that Flash content...
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  What do you invest your time and energy into, then? The "web format" isn't open in a meaningful way either when it's dictated by a monopoly, to fit their business needs in a closed ecosystem of servers at hardcoded IPs/certificates and a "browser" pretending to be open but overwhelmed with features to the point nobody can compete in the name of self-declared "web standards".
  - fsflover 6y ago
    > What do you invest your time and energy into, then? Libreoffice instead of MS Office, GNU/Linux instead of Windows or Mac, Firefox instead of other browsers, distributed social networks based on free software (Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfeld) instead of the monopolies, Librem 5 instead of IPhone, Pinetab instead of IPad, Pinetime instead of Apple Watch, Bandcamp instead of Spotify and many more: https://prism-break.org/en/ https://prism-break.org/en/
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    I've gathered together what's left of it and invest in that. Through much trial and error, I've figured out the bits which work in both Chrome and the rest of the 25 years worth of historic browsers and write for that.
    - 6y ago

svikashk 6y ago

> It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone. One of the main reasons why I download stuff (YouTube videos/articles), so I can always revisit it whenever I want to.

thayne 6y ago

> While I won't be able to convince most of my friends or family to keep their own files for all of their valued content, since it can be a difficult hassle for nontechnical users hey, it's a difficult hassle for technical users too. And the flip side of this is I don't want to lose all my data if my hard drive dies. I think ideally you keep your data both locally and encrypted in the cloud, but that isn't trivial to do.

cjfd 6y ago
Or just have a spare hard drive outside the house on which you backup the hard drive every few months or so. This is what I do to protect my media files.
- thayne 6y ago
  which is even more of a hassle, and more difficult to automate. Not to mention you need somewhere outside of your house to keep said hard drive.