What's your favorite comic book and what's the last one you've read?

[Bootay]

That is a good idea.

[kahlid74]

Hell yeah on the CD's, I do the same thing. Same exact thing, I have the same phobia of buying access to something. My friend just recently had to borrow a ton of my CD's cause his Ipod with ALL this music crapped out. Something was wrong with itunes, so he couldnt get all the stuff back.

Whats the big deal about space regarding the comics?! I have a couple long boxes and they dont take up that much space, granted I have a house, but doesnt mostly everyone here? 90 percent of you guys are in the midwest and land out there is cheap.   The wife getting mad at you reading an actual comic book is a little weird to me, no offense.

So here's where I emphasize that your friend losing his collection has nothing to do with a digital medium and everything to do with being responsible in the digital age and backing up data that's important to you.  There's just no excuse imo anymore for people who lose data.  Just like you get insurance on things that matter to you, you should also get insurance for your data in the way of a backup.

The wife thing is complicated.  I fell in love with a woman who isn't into/doesn't quite get all of my quirky qualities/hobbies and that in a sense is what made her so damn attractive.  She's a fancy pants and is super girly/smart and grew up in a very tight family.  So she wants my time 100% towards our family which I agree with but there is also a side where we both need to still be individuals.  So there is a give/take that goes on as similar in most relationships.  It really comes down to what she sees as entertainment and what I see as entertainment.  Every day she opens up more to my quirks and hobbies and everyday is new and different.  I wouldn't change her for the world.  Her challenging me propels me to better myself.

Space wise at my prime I was filling a box of comics every 1-2 weeks.  That's at least 24 boxes a year.  Are you sure your house has enough storage for that?  I sure as hell don't.  But I've got plenty of space in my server racks for more SANs that can hold years of comics in a single 3U chassis.

[Vigo]

I don't quite see how digital and physical music equate in that same way. Quality differences aside, a lot of digital stuff comes packed with a DRM or other securities disallowing a back up to another source. For example, the minute my old sony MP3 player breaks , I can't take the music I purchased online from Sony for it and put it on my brand new iPod. Even if I backup, it is a fail. The average person doesn't even realize what is sometimes encoded into their music and video when they purchase, and a lot of places are not upfront on whether or not they encode a DRM into it.

In the case of the iPod, there is no first party option to back up your music at all, at least last time I checked. I haven't used any of the new iPods, but on mine you can only pull off your music by downloading a 3rd party utility that will export the music from the iPod, and depending on what the music tag says, it will alter the naming scheme in the process. A lot of people also have been aggravated by the Sync function on itunes. If they lose their music on their computer, many people naturally plug in their iPod to see if they can retrieve it. Well, if they didn't turn off Sync in iTunes they will be rudely surprised that their music lacking iTunes automatically synced their iPod with it, aka: erased all the music on the iPod without warning because there was no music in iTunes.

Also, backing up is a risk itself. A few years back, I was backing up my hard drive to an external drive I had set up as a backup. During the transfer process, both my drives because corrupt. I don't know if it was a power surge or virus what, when I came back I found I had two corrupted hard drives. Legal documents, projects, artwork, photos. I am glad I was savvy enough to get back some of it, but I lost a lot of stuff.

More recently, I resolved to backup my music on the Google play. After two weeks of straight bandwidth usage and stalled up internet, I finally uploaded most of my music. Talk about a complete pain. I have a feeling that getting it back would be the same kind of hassle.

[kahlid74]

Good thought's Vigo.  My experiences with DRM music is that in all cases the provider allows you to make a "CD" with the music.  Since the CD has no DRM protection on it one can simply rip the CD back down to possess DRM free music.  Additionally all providers that I know of utilize cloud based systems where your account is pegged with what is yours and you can re-download it as many times as you want.  If a provider only allows for a single download that wouldn't be a smart buy IMO.  I've purchased music from Amazon/Sony/Walmart/iTunes and all of them let me download it as many times as I want and make CD's off of it.  So I can always get it back from those sources.

I'm going to challenge you for a moment in saying that backing up is a risk.  In your case I do not believe that the act of backing up is to blame.  Being in the position I am I've been privy to a lot of interesting situations surrounding backups and the act of backing up is never what's in question.  What is in question is always the laziness, shortcuts taken or hardware failure (known and accepted by management) on a backup system that causes it to fail during recovery or to possess corrupted data.  Your case proves that anything can happen but the digital items you possessed would IMO dictate or establish their own rules system to be backed up (legal documents being high value would be not only backed up locally but also in a remote system like Dropbox or Mozy.  Equally they would be encrypted) so as to the event you encountered would be mitigated from the loss of all of your data.

It's like a screw driver in your garage.  You close your garage door so your neighbor doesn't come over and take it.  You have a spare one in your basement so you can grab it if your wife or child takes the one from your garage and you have one in your car for worst case scenarios.  That is with the idea that the screw driver is important enough to you where you need to have it at any time.

[Donkbaca]

A bunch of old CDs came with DRM too, remember that big class action with Sony?  Plus scrubbing music of DRM is just as easy as ripping it to your drive.  Plus with all the cloud stuff, its easier to go all digital, because then its all saved at a central spot like Kahlid said.

FWIW, they ARE expirementing with the buy a hard copy get a digital free, or buy a digital get a discount on the hard copy, etc.  There will always be a market for tangible goods - people still buy vinyl records - but most people will forgo it in exchange for convenience.  Ebooks outsell printed books now, I don't see comics bucking that trend.

[Louis Tully]

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