Backup Plan

In a recent letter, a reader asked if his collection of 450 CDS would deteriorate if he stored them in the attic. I have around 900 CDS ripped to my music server’s hard drive. Since I have no desire to do all that work again, my music collection is also now backed up on Microsoft’s servers. An Office 365 personal subscription costs $70 per year and includes one terabyte of online storage for a single user— enough space to hold two or three thousand CDS ripped in lossless FLAC format. A family plan is $100/ year and allows for up to five users with one terabyte per user. I keep the physical CDS boxed up as well, but only as proof that I have licenses for all the ripped files. Even if my house burns down, I can buy a new computer and download my full music collection from the cloud.

Bob Wortman / Rainsville, Alabama