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Previously, we discussed DRM and how it is a category of technology which is harmful and intentionally limiting to keep you from accessing and appreciating things you purchase outside of the specific restricted "walled garden" that the publisher intends. DRM is getting more and more extreme with each passing day, as the vast majority of people have moved, for example, from owning DRM-free, rippable CDs of their music to paying monthly to stream music from Spotify. Some day, when Spotify is gone, all that music will be gone, and nobody that paid for Spotify, regardless of how long they did so for, will have access to any of it. And using DRM puts you entirely at the mercy of the corporation you're paying for these services; for instance, Amazon can remotely delete books from your Kindle (and has), or Spotify can remove podcasts or music that you pay a subscription specifically for, with no recourse from you.
So I started to think, what would the alternative be? How could I fight against this and keep my own data unencumbered and free, and accessible for years to come? How do I make sure that twenty years from now I'll still be able to listen to The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, or play Total Annihilation: Kingdoms and Tony Hawk's Underground?
My entire life, I've done a horrible job preserving my data. I've had to reacquire the same GameCube game .iso files countless times over the years, for example - exact same data with the exact same hash - and every time I move computers I've trashed all but a small subset of crucial files I keep in a backup folder. I've lost writing, artwork, pictures, videos, games, saves, replays, paperwork, books..... an astonishing amount of things were permanently deleted ("paved over") every time I switched computers. And even though I tried to keep everything in a backup folder for quick transfer, space considerations on my computer's boot drive and also just sheer forgetfulness always lead to some stuff falling through the cracks.
Once I realized this, that's when I got pushed over the edge and finally decided to buy some real archival storage. I purchased myself a Samsung T7 Shield external SSD with 2TB of capacity that works through USB, so that I can use it on both my old ThinkPad laptops and also my accursed Windows 11 laptop that I need for work. It's also one of the more rugged external SSDs I could find, with some shock resistant rubber on the outside and a drop rating. I just keep it plugged into my current computer, and when I switch to another computer I just plug it into the new one. All of my important files are there now.
First I started by copying over my archive folder that I've been transferring between computers forever to the external SSD. That was great. But then I realized: I still have another 1.9TB of space left over for whatever I want. What do I do with it?
That's when I became obsessed with GOG. I started buying tons of games on GOG, even games I had purchased before on other platforms like Steam, so that I could create an archive of all of my important games to keep. Now I don't have to worry about validating with Steam to play the games I care about the most (and the GOG versions of games are, for the most part, better than their Steam counterparts anyways). But that didn't even take that much space; besides The Witcher III, most of the games on GOG are at most a few gigabytes, and usually a few hundred megabytes. The DOS games in particular are only a couple megabytes each, since they were mostly games released on floppy disk. So I still had storage left over.
Then I turned my attention to non-PC games, like ROMs for GameBoy or GameCube, and started storing those on the drive as well. Even full collections of GB, GBC, and GBA games didn't take that much storage, and neither did portable copies of multiple emulators for the aforementioned systems.
Next is books. With a combination of various sites and tools (primarily archive.org), I started to make a big collection of a lot of classic books that I can easily copy over to my cheap Lenovo Android tablet to read with free software PDF/EPUB readers from F-Droid. These take almost no space at all in storage per book, but provide hours upon hours of education or entertainment, all easily accessible on a tablet, laptop, or other e-reader device.
And now we circle back to music. One of the last streaming services I used on a daily basis was YouTube Music, which I accessed on my Android phone in Firefox with uBlock Origin so that I didn't have any ads. This ended up working in practice similarly to having a Spotify subscription, but the audio quality wasn't super great, the volume would spike up or down randomly even within a single album, and I couldn't play consistently in the background while having any other software up (like a navigational app when driving). So, I've instead switched to buying music as high quality/high resolution FLAC files from bandcamp and qobuz. Now, I have copies of my albums that I can transfer between devices and play with free software players like Apollo Music Player.
Through all these different services and files, both free and paid, I now have an extensive archive of my own of material I'm interested in. And after all of this, I still have 900GB of space left over to work with. No corporation can make me pay yet again for these pieces of software, or books, or music. I don't have to rent out digital data anymore, paying monthly for multiple services or being tethered to the internet just to access the stuff that's most important to me. And all this was unlocked by just purchasing an external drive for $150. That's not the cheapest price to pay ever, but considering how much I'm going to save from streaming services, if I keep this material for over 10 months even one streaming service subscription of $15 a month would be more expensive than just having my archive at the ready. And best of all, you're removing more of your reliance on corporations with profit, not your best interest, at heart.
Enjoy art, and help make it last. Start archiving!
March 19, 2025