On Collecting
Cosmo Lee, metal writer for Decibel magazine as well as a stack of other publications, was recently burgled. Among the items taken were the hard drives housing his music collection (having last year moved to a completely digital collection). Lee has posted an insightful post on Invisible Oranges about his feelings at losing something that took a considerable chunk of time, money and effort to put together. He seems pretty philosophical about the whole thing and it’s a good reminder that music collections are not irreplaceable.
Being exceptionally geeky, the first thing that pops into my mind, of course, is backups. We have a large CD collection and although it’s all digitized as well, the idea of re-digitizing in the event of a hard drive failure or other loss is pretty daunting – it’s over 140 gig at present. 1 terabyte drives are cheap now, so a backup external hard drive is one option. Blu-Ray drives are also coming right down in price, although dual-layer media is still a bit expensive – but burning our entire collection onto three discs is an appealing option and definitely one that wouldn’t take up much physical space.
I don’t buy digital music because of DRM and the inferior quality of digital media, but this brings up an interesting angle – were your digital collection to be lost or stolen, theoretically you could re-download the files that you legally own. Unfortunately, I don’t trust the system enough to be part of something like that!