digital is mine if it's on my hard drive and a couple backup drives that won't all get destroyed by the same tornado or nuclear bomb
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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I can pirate 1TB of movies and store them in an encrypted cloud backup (so they don't know it's copyrighted material) for significantly less than the cost of Netflix for a whole year.
I do this for my 500~ ebooks in addition to more important stuff because they're so small.
It's actually like 4 dollars a month to store my entire lifetime so far of home movies and pictures.
I've done this but built my own server. Not sure what the better move would have been. I suppose I could still move things to a data center, but I like having it all local.
Where do you go for your ebooks? Do you also do audio books? Been looking to get on some private trackers.
I've got my own server as well, just saying backblaze backups for me have been incredibly cheap since I don't have anything else off-site. It makes buying digital media even less enticing.
Ebooks are from Anna's Archive, MyAnonamouse (private, but very easy to get in especially if you're in another tracker already), or Bibliotik (private, not as easy to get in). Anna's honestly has 99% of the content I need and usually has stuff the other two don't just by nature of being public and easily accessible. The only real advantage to the other two is the Requests system, because Bib users especially have access to many different academic libraries and other resources to grab books for you, even if it takes a little while. I've had some pretty obscure stuff get filled with requests from there. MAM is less reliable because it's essentially semi-open and doesn't enforce the same quality standards. You can find a lot of old collections that are poorly scanned PDFs when newer epub versions of those books are already available. They just don't purge 'em.
MAM is actually good for audiobooks though since they'll kill your Bib ratio really fast if you aren't a big uploader yourself. MAM is pretty much ratio free because it works off very generous bonus points from seeding.
Your own server is the best choice if possible. The cost of even mechanical hard drives has gone up so much, I'm not surprised people would turn to cloud solutions.
Yeah, I got in on it before the massive increases, I have a few spares too. I managed to get them on individual auctions. It's not going to pay for itself anytime soon, but nobody can delete my media now! Used enterprise drives are still an absolute steal for home servers.
what cloud service do you use?
Ente is great but so much work to setup. Micro service architecture really doesn't make self hosting any easier.
Oh for self-hosting I strongly prefer Immich. Ente is good for someone who is willing to pay for something like Google Photos though with their cloud option. Figured not everyone has servers set up or wants to bother, especially with hardware prices right now.
And it's in a relatively accessible format.
Digital is great! It's just that The Cloud is someone else's computer, and they could stop sharing whenever.
It's heartbreaking that one increasingly has to clarify this to people. Thanks Steve Jobs 
Good luck repossessing my UMD of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl 
I have a UMD copy of Dude, Where's My Car?. it's one of my most prized possessions
Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours
We'll just see about that 
Even Google refunded everything Stadia-related, that should be the expectation if companies are going to pull this BS.
you can either rent a movie, or rent a movie but 4 times as expensive