Very simple and worth repeating ad nauseum: Your digital goods are not yours unless they're physically in your own control. I vaguley sympathize with this person's situation, but this is why if you have shitloads of music, movies, ebooks and whatnot, it's a wise idea to do your best to have as many of them as you can as non-cloud, DRM-free copies right inside your own damn hard drive and fuck the rest or any TOS or rules that say otherwise. Only in this way can nobody can take them away unless your machine is literally broken, stolen or hacked and corrupted. People who "own" dozens of movies on Amazon Prime, or hundreds/thousands of songs on iTunes shouldn't be too surprised when one of these indifferent bigcorps suddenly wipes their digital world away from under them, often for some totally arbitrary bullshit reason. It happens often enough to not just be a hypothetical scare story for anyone.
I think you're right. More people should take matters into their own hands by self-hosting and storing their data locally. Decades ago a home server was almost unreachable for a non-technical computer user. These days there are point-and-click, drag-and-drop, plug-and-play, open-app-and-tap solutions to getting a file server set up in your house. You do pay a premium for the user friendliness but they aren't horrendously expensive. For those of us who are comfortable with installing an OS and setting up NFS or SMB you can get away with a used thin client for a fraction of a peanut. And storage is cheap as ever at roughly $40USD per TB for a new drive. Linux is stable and free with a bunch of tools for managing backups and redundancy. There has honestly never been a better time to get off cloud services and go the DIY route.
It's for that reason I buy music from sites that give you a ZIP download of DRM free lossless files. Used to do it with eMusic in the '00s, now do it via Bandcamp.
For non indie artists I'll buy physical vinyl if it's a good enough record. Otherwise just rip the occasional song via NewPipe.
Same goes for books. DRM free Epub or physical copy.
I will say that I don't have this policy for videogames, but frankly it's only because I got tired of paying through the nose for a gaming PC. It's cheaper to just stream them via Stadia, esoecially since I don't go back to them like I would with music or books.
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Very simple and worth repeating ad nauseum: Your digital goods are not yours unless they're physically in your own control. I vaguley sympathize with this person's situation, but this is why if you have shitloads of music, movies, ebooks and whatnot, it's a wise idea to do your best to have as many of them as you can as non-cloud, DRM-free copies right inside your own damn hard drive and fuck the rest or any TOS or rules that say otherwise. Only in this way can nobody can take them away unless your machine is literally broken, stolen or hacked and corrupted. People who "own" dozens of movies on Amazon Prime, or hundreds/thousands of songs on iTunes shouldn't be too surprised when one of these indifferent bigcorps suddenly wipes their digital world away from under them, often for some totally arbitrary bullshit reason. It happens often enough to not just be a hypothetical scare story for anyone.
I think you're right. More people should take matters into their own hands by self-hosting and storing their data locally. Decades ago a home server was almost unreachable for a non-technical computer user. These days there are point-and-click, drag-and-drop, plug-and-play, open-app-and-tap solutions to getting a file server set up in your house. You do pay a premium for the user friendliness but they aren't horrendously expensive. For those of us who are comfortable with installing an OS and setting up NFS or SMB you can get away with a used thin client for a fraction of a peanut. And storage is cheap as ever at roughly $40USD per TB for a new drive. Linux is stable and free with a bunch of tools for managing backups and redundancy. There has honestly never been a better time to get off cloud services and go the DIY route.
It's for that reason I buy music from sites that give you a ZIP download of DRM free lossless files. Used to do it with eMusic in the '00s, now do it via Bandcamp.
For non indie artists I'll buy physical vinyl if it's a good enough record. Otherwise just rip the occasional song via NewPipe.
Same goes for books. DRM free Epub or physical copy.
I will say that I don't have this policy for videogames, but frankly it's only because I got tired of paying through the nose for a gaming PC. It's cheaper to just stream them via Stadia, esoecially since I don't go back to them like I would with music or books.