Imagine your hard drive crashes or a virus attacks it and you effectively loose all your photos , music and books. What would be the cost of replacement and can you replace? Well today it may not be much, it is estimated to be around £257 on average, but is bound to change as our storage moves from physical to digital.
OK we all back up our files in a disciplined and routine way. We all have external hard drives. We are all covered by insurance both today and tomorrow. So what is the problem?
Which Computing recently found that insurers would not pay to replace tracks and only cover fire theft and flood. Only 22 of the 46 surveyed would offer any kind of insurance cover for digital collections and none covered hardware or mechanical failures. In addition, there is the question of whether laptops, MP3 players and mobiles are fully covered by home insurance when outside the home.
Collections are just that collections and often take time to build and treasured. Remember that it will often not be possible to go back and ask for another copy for free so we need to back things up. This means that the DRM systems need to let us do this as well as recognise that when we restore them they will be often on a different machine and maybe different operating system.
