I may be mistaken here, but I am pretty sure many legit music download services keep a record of what you've bought on your account and allow you to redownload everything in the case of a hard drive crash, theft or other disaster. iTMS and Napster certainly allow this. Annoying if you've got several gigs to redownload, but not a disaster by any means. And insurers aren't going to care about your not-so-legitimate lost downloads.

With the likes of Mozy offering free (up to 2Gb) offsite backup and mp3tunes.com giving unlimited music storage away for free, there's no excuse (other than ignorance...) for not backing up data these days, even for the home user. I pay mp3t $40 for their unlimited, file-size unlimited service and have over 100Gb music there. took a while to upload but it's all safe and I can stream it at work. Now that's what Web 2.0 is about!

On the other hand, I was at a client's site the other day and discovered that the HD he had four years worth of un-backed-up photos on was manufactured in Dec 1998. Ouch. Bad sectors agogo. Photos there were none; he's currently deciding whether to spend the cash on a drive recovery service.

Calum

Not something that even occurred to me, I have to admit. But surely legal download services like iTunes keep a record of the music you own? Can't you just log in again and re-download your music? I might have to test this theory.

As to music you have ripped - if you lose the physical copy (CDs) too, you have effectively lost your license to own that music, and thus can easily claim it on insurance.

I would have thought the only music you would lose in this situation is stuff you have ripped or downloaded and do not have any proof of ownership - and thus I can quite understand insurance companies refusing to pay out!

Just checked with Directline and they'll only cover upto £1000. Over the years im sure people with go over that!

As far as I remember when you purchase and download you get a warning that you should backup your music because if you lose the files it's your problem not theirs.

But it's Apple so everyone is happy with their policies anyway... they are too cool!

From what I read you *can* redownload from iTMS, though you do have to contact the support team, and you're not encouraged to make a habit of it:

“In the event that a customers entire music library is lost, the iTunes Music Store does re-grant the purchases history. Please keep in mind that Apple does not offer protection against the loss of purchases, so this is a one-time exception.”

http://lifehacker.com/software/itunes/redownload-your-lost-itunes-music-176323.php

http://thecontent.wordpress.com/2006/05/24/itunes-lets-people-re-download-all-your-music-once/

http://www.lifeparticles.com/2006/05/25/itunes-lets-people-re-download-all-your-music-once/

Other stores quite openly allow redownloading of lost purchases.

That's BS. iTunes will only allow you to re-download to the same computer you used to purchase that music.

Everything from the limited number of computers you can register with your account to the complete shit you get if you convert to mp3 has been designed with forcing you to re-purchase in mind.

Even if you own an iPod, if you've been buying your music or movies online for more than a couple of years the chances are you don't have the storage space to keep it all intact.

Off site backups? Nice idea if you can do it, personally I don't have that option. I certainly don't have a safe place at work I would leave anything valuable, and although I have friends I know wouldn't steal or deliberately damage something I gave them to look after - it's a bit of cheek handing over valuables and forcing the responsibility of keeping them safe onto your friends or family.

I do have an external HD - I learned my lesson the very hard way, and unlike most people I have forked out the money for a fireproof safe. But that's not something most people can either afford or would normally consider.

The real culprits as far as I'm concerned are the media sellers. They have records of your transactions, they know what you've bought - but they will not allow you to re-download onto any computer except the one you used to download it originally.

Not much of a comfort if your home goes up in smoke, your hard disk dies or you need to re-install your OS.

The minimum length of time they should provide you a backup of your music is the same length of time you would normally expect a CD to last. They charge the same amount of money - without the expense of providing media or packaging.

I will never buy from a download site again until I have no choice but to do so. I have software that removes the viruses and other malware they put onto commercial CDs, and buying in that format gives me a reliable backup for about 20 - 30 years if I take reasonable care.

I'm fed up with the "Apple are saints" bullshit. They are as much a money grabbing corporate as Microsoft, Sony, Intel or IBM. Hell, they've even taken a page from their association with the music industry and started suing their own customers for often the most absurd reasons.

How did they work out the average cost of replacement would be over £250?

Whilst iTunes is popular, haven't we had articles on here saying most users download a few tracks and thats it? The average download is no where near 250 songs!

I suspect whoever were asked simply stated the number of tracks in their library, and weren't asked if they were ripped from CD or downloaded from whatever source.

A $60 fireproof safe and a $60 external USB drive == safety. No uploading to backup sites, no redownloading anything.

Such byzantine DRM and risk-management concerns are major reasons why I, for one, have yet to get on the download express. I still purchase CDs. They are ripped and burnt for daily use (and loss!) and then stored as archives. Should a disc be scratched or lost or should the HDD crash, it's a simple matter to rip or burn again. Such tangible media are covered by my homeowners should the whole lot go up in smoke, and no DRM or proprietary hassles with a download "service".

My digital photos are backed up regularly with all other data to a supplemental HDD. Should *that* go up in smoke, well, then, they're lost but so would be my decades' worth of celluloid pictures. There are limits to the time and effort I have available for what I consider reasonable risk management.

The comments on USB external HDD and a fire safe are good points indeed and I may yet go that route.

Should the day come when all is online, no more tangible media, and we're still cursed with DRM, then I guess that's when I become a satellite radio subscriber.

In general, forget fireproof safes - there is no such thing as fireproof.

The majority are only designed to protect paper, and do this by generating moisture to stop the paper burning even though it reaches high temperatures. Media will simply be destroyed by the heat.

There are fire safes designed for magnetic media, but check the specs very carefully - they only control the temperature for a short time and can only survive a certain amount of physical abuse while hot. If you are on the third floor and the fire safe ends up in the basement then it might be damaged to the point where it stops giving protection. Even if it isn't, if the fire brigade don't cool it off quickly enough then you still lose your data.

Realistically, is there really anyone so lonely that they don't have a single friend who would store them a hard disk (preferably two) for an off-site backup ? It's not an onerous task and it really isn't transferring a burden to them - OK you have to trust them to not give it away, but it probably doesn't need any more security than they already apply to not have their telly etc nicked ! It's only there as a recovery thing if your house goes up in smoke - if they accidentally wipe it or whatever then unless they do it when your house catches fire you can simply re-copy everything next time roound.

Since they are probably in the same situation, the logical answer is to do a swap - you store their off-site backup whicle they store yours !

One of my friends just called, and, believe it or not, had to get a restore of music he'd downloaded from the (now defunct) MSN music download service yesterday.

He was successful, after about 90 minutes on the phone with Microsoft, requiring (as he put it) "...a DNA sample to prove who I am...". But, he was issued a one-time logon to the archive and was able to restore his entire purchase list.

This may prove to be an exception, however: MSN is still existent, although the music store is now gone. It may be much more difficult to get content when the provider well and truly goes T.U. - as I discovered when TV Guide killed off the Rocket eBook. They gave the customer base a couple of months to download their content and back it up, then destroyed the archives.

So, the morale of the story is make consistent copies and keep them archived off-site, and be sure to update the archives every year or so as the technology transitions and hardware is rendered obsolete. And DON'T consider an on-line repository "safe" - all it takes is one lawsuit or a revision to copyright legislation and THAT could become inaccessable!

(Me? I keep a couple of hard drives with backups of our home RAID server in our safe deposit box at a bank in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and rotate the volumes out every year or so...)

This is a problem that has confronted my friends and myself before - hard drive crashes and computer theft had cost us many months of downloads. A bit of research into VPNs - Virtual Private Networks - provided us with the perfect solution.

A number of us here have set up a "darknet" - a VPN that allows us to connect and share all our media files over the internet, but only with each other. This darknet has grown as friends of friends joined in and added their own media collections to the system. We now have currently over 30 computers on the darknet scattered all over our city, and with everyone copying everyone else's media collections on a continuous basis, its no problem for any of us to recover lost media files if something does go wrong.

Those of us with hacking skills routinely strip any DRM from everybody's media files, so NONE of our media is encumbered with DRM - as soon as someone acquires a new DRM'ed file, we hack it to a free format and redistribute it across the darknet, telling the original file owner to take the DRM'ed one out of the loop.

Of course this is "illegal" i.e. against the biased and self-serving laws forced on us by the copyright cartels, but since by definition a darknet is a closed loop and all new members are vetted by our core group before being able to access the network, there's not much the cartels can do about it. Besides spreading the cost of obtaining media files, it gives everyone peace of mind in knowing that if anyone's computer is damaged or stolen, they can easily get back their media collection from the rest of us.

If you have friends around the place, you should be considering doing this with them. It takes a little effort and work to get the VPN up and running, but once it's in place you can share your media with your friends safely and securely without worrying about being busted, and you'll never have to worry about losing your media files again.

I'd be surprised that 24% had lost it to fire, really I would. So let's just admit that these people have lost their precious music because they failed to make the required backup - as usual.

Well it's the normal process, people. You buy a PC, you have a friend who knows about them tell you how to do things, you don't do what they tell you and one day, inevitably (hey, we're talking Windows, right?), you learn the hard way - the same way everyone learns - that they were right.

And once you've learned your lesson, you do your backups (well, mostly, right ?). I fail to see why insurance should cover this, it's a case of education, not loss. If people are smart enough to do their backups properly, they don't need insurance.

And if your house goes up in smoke, you're going to have a lot more to worry about than your music collection.