I have a question regarding storage and how to organize digital content. I've been buying stuff on Itunes and I think I want to continue to do that, but I'm a little worried about storage space on the computer. I probably shouldn't be because I do have plenty now, but just generally, where do you put your digital content so it doesn't take up so much space on the computer? Do you have USB discs to put it on as back ups or is there an easier way to organize. I'm just merely curious at this point.
I haven't used it personally but by from what I've read, Crashplan gives you easy backup, unlimited storage and peace of mind for a pretty low monthly fee. Though it also depends on how much you've got - there's facilities such as Microsoft One Drive and DropBox which offer free storage but limited capacity (not sure if Google Drive has free storage). When backing up your data there's the 3-2-1 rule, 3 copies, 2 types of medium and 1 is kept offsite. Use of the services above would given the offsite storage and second backup medium but would also allow you to access them from anywhere on devices such as phones and tablets. Multiple USB drives can get messy (trying to keep track of what's where). You can get high capacity USB 3.0 thumb drives (128/256GB) but they can carry a price premium. External 1TB drives aren't too badly priced. IF you didn't need the capacity but wanted speed, SSD drives are coming down in price and you fit one into a 3rd party case. Advantage is that you can leave it a friends/relative's place for being offsite. Drawback is you can't access the contents and you'll need to get the drive backup in order to update it's contents.
Only caveat is you need to determine what which hard disk is used. Western Digital is the general recommendation, Seagate, well not as good as they used to be, Toshiba avoid like the plague (they also now own OCZ in the SSD market and those drives are also to be avoided). Not sure if anyone uses HGST in their external drives. They are are bit more expensive but from the reviews seem to be the leader of the pack.
^ I've had good luck with Samsung HDD's, both in the old desktop and the laptop, and fair luck with Seagate (true, not as good as they used to be). I have my ripped music & DVD/blu-ray content on 2-3 large HDD's. I bought a Thermaltake HDD dock that I can swap 2 of either size HDD in/out of.
For external drives:- I use a HGST Touro as my primary backup clone drive and it does work fine. (On the other hand though, I also have a Toshiba Canvio Basics for another backup of music/videos and never had an issue with that). For internals back when I first started with PCs, I've had a couple of Seagates go on me
You need to keep an eye on all your digital storage, and maintain it actively. None of the currently existing services will exist in 20-30 years. Some codecs will stop working. Some DRM will stop working. File formats will go extinct. Discs, drives, flash storage will be corrupted. Slot standards will change. If you think you can just put something on a HDD and lock it away, think again.
Yes DRM could be an issue but I think you're being overly pessimistic about file formats. If people can still find ways of reading proprietary formats from 30 years ago I don't think there's any chance of currently used video and audio formats becoming extinct in the next 20 years. There's a) too much data stored in those formats for them to go away and b) the information is out there to people can continue to develop apps to play it.
Some file formats, like .divx were flashes in the pan. Some, like .wmv are specific to a player/OS. I've ripped most of my video to .avi, hopefully it will be one that lasts.
I've got a few spare machines around which have been test or previous main machines and I just copy everything to them, they either are running Win7 which is good until 2020 IIRC or a LTS Linux Distro which is free anyway, also handy when my main machine should fail, I just plug in the fastest backup machine and I am back online.
Off topic. ^ Is there some copyright thing that prevents a 2nd party from releasing updates for Win7 after MS stops supporting it?
You can nevertheless still play back DivX-encoded videos with free codecs, and there is no reason to believe you will ever not have that ability, as the source code will remain available indefinitely. Likewise, WMV can be played on non-Windows devices, assuming it's not encrypted WMV (and not much is anymore). AVI is a crummy format, I'm not sure why one would use that in this day and age when there are much better open-source alternatives available.
I used to use vistacodec/win7codec from Shark007 with good results. The later versions were packed with malware and/or viruses, so I gave up on them. At this point I don't have anything outside of .avi & .mp4 videos, anything I download from YT is .mp4 and MP4 Downloader can convert anything into anything. I use .avi for ripping DVD's & blu-rays, and like any format, the output results are as good as the input. I did all the LOTR movies in 1920x1080 and they look flawless.
Also keep in mind lossless and lossy compression formats. If you convert from one lossy compression to another (for example to stay up to date with the codecs), over time you lose information, just like with analog copying.
I just use your computer as my personal cloud server. :tech man: No, i use my hard drive and I use my one drive dropbox etc etc. Itunes cloud stores everything anyway that you buy.