A page categorizing all of the many, many reasons to buy, use, and store physical media.

The big one for me was:

Google Play Music shut down in December 2020 and was replaced by YouTube Music. Not all user libraries survived the transition intact.

This lead to me spinning up my first self-hosted service, Airsonic¹. Since then I've got dozens of services running with 73 TB of spinning metal for backups. I archive all of my purchased books, music, photos, games, and beloved online videos daily. Between all the services and tools that Google has killed and all the content censorship and removal that the linked page has documented, I don't trust anything online at all. "The internet is forever"? Well, not lately, no.

Join us at /r/datahoarder. We have cookies.

1. Though I have since happily transitioned to Navidrome. ↩