The joys (and pains) of media

Isn't media great? Thankfully it's moved on from the 90s buzz-word of "multimedia". Everything from pictures, music, books, films all the way through to my old undergraduate lecture notes. This is the stuff that can provoke a wide range of emotional responses from nostalgia all the way through to relaxation. In the days of the 20th century all this media came in different forms: photographs, cassettes/CDs, vhs/DVD. In the early days on the 21st century people began converting to digital cameras which freed them from the shackles of being careful what shots to make to conserve film and having to print out (and then store) all their pictures. In the middle of the noughties people began to embrace digital music in the place of physical CDs to the point where the top40 was nearly abolished and many shops stopped selling all but the most popular singles. As we move towards the next decade, there is increased interest in video downloads and ebooks - in fact ebook readers are starting to be rammed down our throats this Christmas, but I can save that for another post. One outcome of this switch from the bulky analogue "physical" formats to the digital domain combined with the increases in codec performance and hard drive size is that people can now store all their media on their computer: full CD collections, a lifetimes photographs, home videos and DVDs. My parents have just bought a document scanner so I now have all my undergraduate notes in pdf format that I can take with me anywhere without needed to lug around the original folders of notes. I've also been able to jettison years of bank and credit card statements too.

I've written about this before in my piece on minimalist lifestyles. In the last few years I set about converting all my precious media into digital form. The majority of my DVDs are now in m4v format and all of my music has been ripped to mp3 (although I have just re-ripped it all to a lossless format for archival purposes). What I haven't really touched on (or thought about until this year) is data security. I was exposed to this in 2001 when my parents PC was stolen during a break-in. All my files (school projects, essays and reviews and emails) were lost. But I was actually quite lucky as that was at the beginning of the digital revolution and I didn't loose too much. I have noticed thought that people don't really think about keeping their media safe, as previously - short of their house burning down - it was fairly safe in physical formats. It's highly unlikely any burglars would be interested in you photo albums but they are interested in the computers that people have entrusted their whole media collections onto. With this goes all the emotional connections their media can trigger. If the computer breaks, is stolen or lost or corrupts all these things are put at risk. It used to be that we were lucky to be able to fit all our music on our computer at ridiculously low bitrates, and now we can fit all our 256 Kbps tracks onto our iPods. There's definitely something very liberating about having your whole music, film, book and photo collection contained on something smaller than a hardback book, but at the same time something that valuable must be fearsomely protected too.

A lot of people will say that hard drives are too expensive, but I would argue that spending a bit of money is a lot better than facing the loss of a media-filled drive. Photos of family, friends and holidays, large collections of emails, music collections and a whole heap of other personal files. I will advise some ways to properly protect your files.

The most obvious way is to simply buy a large external hard drive and copy all your files to it. The trouble with this approach is maintaining this backup as you add and update more media files. Solutions such as Time Machine for Mac offer a good way of keeping an incremental backup (so older versions of files are preserved as well as new ones) or SyncToy for windows (for simple synchronisation of drives) are free solutions. Simply doing this will put you ahead of 90% of people who have no backup at all - a 1 TB USB drive costs about £60-65 at the moment. If you share media between several computers, a NAS (i.e. a hard drive that plugs into your network router) is a good option as anyone on your network can access the files. More expensive models offer two or more drives and offer so-called data redundancy. The idea is that with two (or more) drives, if one drive dies, the data is still on the other one (obviously your storage is equal to the size of the smallest drive) and with three or more drives, the data is spread across them in such a way that any drive failing won't result in a loss of files.

A lot of people rely on these multidisk NAS solutions but it isn't foolproof. If more than one drives dies, or the unit itself dies, or you are robbed or your house burns down you're equally stuffed. Unless you genuinely need more than a couple of terabytes of storage I'd simply recommend a simple NAS such as this one and then also buy a USB drive which you can use to back up the NAS automatically at set periods and then store at another location such as work. To be really thorough, buy 2 USB drives, keep one at home to back up the NAS and one at work changing them over every week or so. This may seem over the top, but for under £250 you can have a secure 1 TB setup (a 1 TB NAS and 2 1 TB USB drives).

The other alternative that probably isn't feasible at the moment for bulk media backups is cloud storage. More and more firms are offering storage space that can be accessed through the internet and backed up using commercial systems. Of course, the downsides to this are a monthly fee for sizeable amounts of storage and the insanely low upload speed most people in the UK see (our "fast" connection offers us 1 Mbps upload compared to 14 Mbps download). For small files (such as documents) I can recommend Dropbox which offers 2 GB of cloud storage for free. Your files can be accessed from any device running dropbox (PCs, Macs, linux, phones).