Digital Download?

When other service providers offer digital download, what they’re not telling you is that they’re uploading your content to public cloud storage. There are a number of public cloud providers, notably Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and countless independent cloud providers.

The “Cloud” is a euphemism for “someone else’s computer.” They’re renting space on a server in a big datacenter somewhere. They put your materials on it, and then give you access through a login. You’re then able to share the content with your friends by sending links. Of course you can download the content too, but it’s often more convenient just to leave it in the cloud.

There are big problems with that:

• Your data is safe only as long as you pay for the cloud storage. It’s a subscription with a monthly (or annual) maintenance fee. If you forget to pay, or your credit card expires and you don’t see the notices, your data is gone.
• Your data is safe only as long as the cloud service provider stays in business – or  as long as they stay in the cloud storage business. No doubt you’ve heard of folks on some big name systems who lost everything because their provider decided they couldn’t handle it all and they just decided to quit. If you didn’t move everything, your data was gone.
• Your data is safe only as long as the transfer company stays in business. Many will "white label" (resell) cloud storage from another service provider, and if the transfer company doesn’t pay their bill, your data is gone.
• And even if the transfer company owns and maintains their own servers in a datacenter, you're still dependent upon whether they stay in the business and don't get hacked.

On top of that, cloud storage has other limitations:

• Data is uploaded and downloaded at internet speeds, which vary widely. Even with really fast internet, it’s slower than copying to a flash drive or hard drive. To make it feasible for these companies to upload large amounts of data, they may downsample or compress your content so it may not be the highest quality  you expect. Otherwise it would take forever for you to download.
• For video content, they may use a streaming service provider, similar to YouTube. On there, when you upload video, they transcode it to various resolutions that will stream successfully on varying internet connections. That means, while the stream is optimized for the viewer's bandwidth, it may have been highly compressed, yielding digital artifacts. And if you download the "source," it may not be the full-resolution source that was created in the transfer.

So, while Cloud storage is great for sharing media with family and friends, is should NOT be considered a permanent data storage solution, especially for large quantities of data. For that you need LOCAL physical media, which is what we provide at Advent Digitizing: flash drives, portable hard drives and optical media.

Once you receive your transfers, you can upload selected items to your own Cloud account to share with family and friends. That way you're in control, and if the cloud account goes poof, your physical copies are still safe.

But you still need to protect those physical copies.  Here's how:

Backup Strategies

Like all computer parts, the drive we deliver your content on will eventually, and inevitably fail. It may be next month, or it may be 20 years from now, but digital data degrades, or the mechanism breaks, or the format becomes obsolete sooner or later.

We keep your master data on file for 90 days following delivery, so if it fails, we can recopy it to new media. But after that, it’s your responsibility.

How to Back Up your Media

Backup is really quite simple, and the awesome part about digital backups is that they are the same quality as the originals!  There's never any generation loss in a straight copy of a digital file. If you routinely recopy the files to fresh media, they will last forever. 

To back up locally, first copy the files we give you to a hard drive on a computer. 

1. Make sure the computer's hard drive has enough available space
2. Create a folder on the hard drive and label it for the media you're going to put there
3. Open both the new folder and the drive with your media in separate File Explorer (PC) or Finder (Mac) windows
4. Select everything on the media drive and drag it to the new destination folder
5. Wait.  It could take several hours, depending on drive speed.

That's your first backup. Unplug the drive and put it in a safe place. This is called an “air gapped” backup, because if your computer is hacked or stolen, or if it just up and fails, the unattached drive will be unaffected.

But then there’s the possibility of fire, flood or theft. So that’s when you need an off-site backup.

Use your computer's backup utility to back up the contents of the hard disk to another external backup drive. You now have your media in three places, so if any one of them fails, you haven't lost a thing.  To take it off site, take that drive to a family member’s place, or put it in a safe deposit box at the bank.

Finally, every 10 years or so (or when they bring out a new type of drive with a new connector standard), get one of the new drives and copy the old one to it. That's how you beat the evolving technology creep.

Can I copy the files to the cloud for backup or sharing?

Absolutely, IF you’ve done the other backups and don’t rely on the cloud to be there forever. You may already have free limited cloud storage available to you:

• Google Drive – available if you have a Google account
• OneDrive – part of a Microsoft 365 subscription
• iCloud - available if you have a Mac or iPad/iPhone
• DropBox, IDrive, Sync, Box – just some of the many other competitors in the cloud storage/file sharing space.

These services limit how much you can store for free. You can purchase extra capacity for a monthly subscription fee.

Now uploading to the cloud presents a problem if you have a typical broadband internet connection. Your upload speed is likely 10x slower than your download speed, so be selective about what you upload, and you may wish to lower the size of the items you want to share. You do that by opening them in an editor and saving with higher compression, or shrinking the pixel dimensions. We can do that in bulk at the time we create your transfers. You keep your high resolution items but share the lightweight ones so it doesn't take forever to upload.

Should I put my pictures on Facebook or Instagram?

Here’s another sticky wicket. A lot of people put their entire lives on social media, but according to Terms of Service, social media companies have access to them. In fact they use shared photos as the basis for AI models used for generative AI and deep fakes.

Sharing video on YouTube has huge privacy risks. They no longer have an "unlisted" category, so your video is either open to the public, or private behind a password. And they can insert ads whenever they want. Paid video sharing services such as Vimeo have much more flexibility and no ads, so these are not considered social media, since they have a monthly subscription fee.

The bigger problem with social media is that it’s often easy for hackers to take over your account and have access to everything, and then they can lock you out so you can’t get to your own stuff. They can use the images to try to scam your friends and family. We’ve rescued more than one person with that problem. Don’t let it happen to you!  Only share on Facebook things you could share with the world, and things you won't be heartbroken if you lose.

Now you know.

Now you know why we don’t offer digital download from the cloud. Nothing is stopping you from using cloud services, but be careful. It’s a wild world out there on the internet.