I'm going physical and you should too!
Aah physical media. Itâs something I havenât really experienced myself in full as a child. I did know what DVDs are and how to use the DVD player on our TV, but thats pretty much it. When I needed a game or program on my PC I either downloaded it online or asked my dad to help, who wasnât really willing to explain things much. He was dealing with everything that had to with my laptop and I wasnât really let near the CD or DVD disks for storage. Granted I wasnât ever interested in physical media as a child and with how stern my dad was, I wasnât really keen on overcoming his anger issues to maybe play around with DVDs.
Now the situation is different. As I've finally found an environment of people, with whom I'm comfortable to express myself and I know I'll be at the very least heard, I am trying to return back to physical media storage units.
This has been kick-started thanks to my wife's parents, actually. I've been gifted a 1TB of SSD storage, a CD/DVD reader/writer and an MP4 player! I should have researched the SSD vs HDD better before making my Christmas list as, already a while after receiving the gift, I realized I could benefit much more from the HDD storage (As I'm mainly using that unit to store, or more like archive, my university files, together with photos), but that's a plan for the future. For now, this will more than suffice. I was able to free up so much space from my poor laptop and old phone, they were finally able to breathe lol.
And so after moving everything around to the SSD, it was time to play around with the CDs and DVDs! The question about music streaming and music ownership is one of the things that, now thinking about it, most likely have kickstarted the fire in me about technology in our modern times, which has recently evolved into de-googlification and trying my best to consume local European solutions (now how do I go around to do that with physical things like clothes ans groceries...I wish there was a one time life payment for good local groceries lol). So that evening I spend downloading music from the CDs we bought and checking old CD and DVD disks for functionality and what's on them. Quite a big buch had to be trown away, due to age and bad storage conditions, but surprisingly to me, a few did survive, even with the contents fully intact!
Now that I've finished with the disks we had in our bedroom, I've been kindly informed my wife's parents they have a mountain of DVD disks with films and what have you on them. In deeply dreading the day I'll have to look through them one by one (â Tâ Tâ ).
P.S. just as a side note for anyone who might get inspired by this post - please don't put all of your eggs in one basket. You need to have multiple places to have backup's of your information on. For me, I have my photos and files on SSD and multiple DVDs, and I'm hoping to get at least 2 HDD drives to use one for backup and the other one as a main storage space. So in future, just for backups, I'll have stacks of DVDs and at least 1 HDD drive. Shit happens and you need to be prepared. Also obv you can use cloud storage, but please actually read the company's policy statements, where they're from, and don't give ur stuff to Google, Gods forbid.
If you have any suggestions for new posts, would like to have a discussion, or just to say hi, don't be shy to shoot me an email. I'd love to hear from you!