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How much is your harddrive worth?

Started by biggytitbo, February 11, 2012, 06:28:03 PM

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biggytitbo

I noticed the other day that I've only got a few gig left on my 1tb media drive and it led me to think just how much that little fucker is actually worth. It has 1000s of TV show episodes on it, 100s of films and 60 gig of MP3s.


If I was to tot it all we're talking £1000s dependent on the delicate mechanical innards of the harddrive carrying on working. I do have some backups but the sheer size involved makes it increasingly difficult.


Almost makes me think someone needs to launch an insurance policy for digital media, although I'm guessing the reason that doesn't exist is because almost everyone's media drive has a lot of illegal downloads on it.


How much is your media drive worth and what kind of backup do you have if things go wrong?

Waking Life

My last external drive took a trip to the floor, which lost me 500gb.  The downloads weren't such a big deal (it was weirdly liberating to lose the ridiculous backlog of things to watch), but it was a shame to lose the pictures.  I'm aware I should have backed up, but it becomes one of those things that you keep 'meaning to get done'.

I have a new 2tb one and now upload all pictures taken full size onto my Picassa account to mitigate against another similar mishap.

I'm hoping blu-ray burners will become pretty standard issue soon, as the capacity of those will make backing up a bit easier.

Consignia

Nothing, surely? Unless it's something you make money on yourself, such as your work, the contents of your hard drive have no financial value.

biggytitbo

Quote from: Consignia on February 11, 2012, 07:34:41 PM
Nothing, surely? Unless it's something you make money on yourself, such as your work, the contents of your hard drive have no financial value.
What about the cost in time and or money of replacing the contents? It'd take me yea to replace the content of my media drive, and a good few thosuand if I was to replace it all legally.

Consignia

Unless you bought the stuff, you are not down financially are you? Sure effort to replace, but you can't put any monetary value on that, and it's no reflection on the value of the data, which is worthless.

Big Jack McBastard

Quote from: Consignia on February 11, 2012, 08:23:48 PMit's no reflection on the value of the data, which is worthless.

Tell that to each of the 4 grand fines we'd be due for every bit of copyright infringement we'd indulged in, or the 5 years in the clink they threaten if they were meted out consecutively.

biggytitbo


Quote from: Consignia on February 11, 2012, 08:23:48 PM
Unless you bought the stuff, you are not down financially are you? Sure effort to replace, but you can't put any monetary value on that, and it's no reflection on the value of the data, which is worthless.
Rubbish. The fact I have all my favourite stuff on that drive means a lot to me, it's worth at least a £1000 quid in terms of stuff I've bought and double that in time and effort in acquiring stuff. That piece of plastic is in monetary terms worth at least as much as a car but worth much more in terms of emotional investment and value. Strange that we leave such value in such an unsafe place.

I accept the terms of the

You have absolutely no idea about how anything has ever worked, ever.

biggytitbo

Quote from: I accept the terms of the on February 11, 2012, 10:01:21 PM
You have absolutely no idea about how anything has ever worked, ever.
You appear to be unable to understand the nature of digital media.


Are you fully there?

Big Jack McBastard

How much is it worth? Hmm ..

What would you pay to have it returned if it were kidnapped?

I accept the terms of the

I'm going to snip this stupid bastard's balls right off.

biggytitbo

Quote from: I accept the terms of the on February 11, 2012, 10:17:24 PM
I'm going to snip this stupid bastard's balls right off.
You titty avatar fool. You have about as much credibility as Stewart Lee on a panel show.

I accept the terms of the


Big Jack McBastard

Now now children lets have less eunuch making round here.

How about we rephrase it: "How much would the combined total of the media you have stashed on your HD be worth if you'd acquired said media legitimately?"

In any case it's a question that would take me fucking ages to calculate and I can't be arsed. Loads though, the only payed for software on my machine are the drivers for my graphics card.

I accept the terms of the

I don't think he needs to worry about that. He's bleeding from the dick.

biggytitbo

Quote from: Big Jack McBastard on February 11, 2012, 10:27:02 PM
Now now children lets have less eunuch making round here.

How about we rephrase it: "How much would the combined total of the media you have stashed on your HD be worth if you'd acquired said media legitimately?"
Yes, although I did acquire some of mine legitimately. It took me around 6 months to rip my 300 dvds to that hard drive, during that time I could have been a male prostitute or invented anti gravity.

biggytitbo

Quote from: I accept the terms of the on February 11, 2012, 10:29:50 PM
I don't think he needs to worry about that. He's bleeding from the dick.
You are literally a turd. By that I mean your actual body is made of faeces and somehow you have become sentient and become able to type (albeit badly and like a tosser) on a computer.


But ultimately you are still a poo.

I accept the terms of the

Data can be insured. You can't insure your movies and videos on the basis that you've taken a long time to download them. What you want is time insurance. You can't have it. You should have insured your balls against me snipping them the fuck off.

biggytitbo

What I want to know is do you leave a brown stain on the keyboard as you type this rubbish?

Big Jack McBastard

Quote from: biggytitbo on February 11, 2012, 09:58:53 PM
Strange that we leave such value in such an unsafe place.

Everything is subject to entropy, one day our HDs will fail like our hearts and take their digital goodness into the ether.

There's not much bar building better drives that anyone can really do, unless you've got a 'No questions asked' repository online.

Big Jack McBastard

Actually come to think of it I've never had a HD fail on me. One of them is a bit noisier than the others but it is older and I only keep a back up OS on it in case of PC arseache.

biggytitbo

BJM as I like to call him is my favourite, he's awesome. Unlike I accept the terms of the, or CUNT as I like to call him.

Big Jack McBastard

The electrons storing your filthy pornography and enormous collection of bear and giant dog based photography must re-enter the karmic stream and emerge anew in a few million years to be the belt buckle of a crazed Max Max-like figure bent on overthrowing bitter psychotic warlords who conspire to smash the moon into the earth in order to destroy his people.

He'll need his trousers to stay up after all.

small_world

900 - Albums (@£5 a pop) = £4500 - (Not really as I could replace them by download, plus I still own the originals)
30 - films (@£5 a pop) = £150 - (Not really as I could replace them by download, plus I still own the originals)
5 - TV series box-sets (@£50 a pop) = £150 - (Not really as I could replace them by download, plus I still own the originals)
Created media - 100hrs worth (@£6 an hour) = £600 - (Real cost, as I can't get these back)
Time taken to download/rip media - 156 hours (@£6 an hour) £936
500 personal photos = Priceless - Time taken to arrange/name/edit 40 hours (@£6 an hour) £240

So, total cost is £6576
Although, the real cost to replace all of it would be far less, consisting of spending time downloading and sorting.
So ~£1776

Those photos, if lost, would be lost forever. You can't account for sentimental value.

Lyndon

You'll be glad to hear that by these criteria I am a millionaire as I have lived 200,000 hours @ £6 an hour. I never knew all that time wanking and reading Harry Potter was so valuable.

small_world

Ha. Have you just realised something?

Yes, time is valuable. Instead of fucking around doing shit for all of those hours, you could have been doing something a bit more worthwhile.

Reminds me of that Mitchell and Webb sketch, about getting to heaven and finding that your true calling looked to be minesweeper or something, as that's what you'd spent most of your time doing.

Obviously you don't earn money for doing recreational activities, but those hours have a value.

momatt

#26
Quote from: Big Jack McBastard on February 11, 2012, 10:49:21 PM
Everything is subject to entropy, one day our HDs will fail like our hearts and take their digital goodness into the ether.

This is my reasoning behind not ever tidying up ever.

If I bought my 100Gbs of music legally it would cost me £11285.71.  Using an average of 7mb and 79p per song.
Of course some of the songs (~5%) are actually legal promotional downloads or my own rips of bought stuff.

I have in the past paid around £300 to get a hard-drive's data recovered.  Twas full of priceless photos from holidays and weddings and was well worth it.
Now I back up mroe frequently.  It's easy, just buy another big hard-drive.  Piece of piss.

But what would this be worth to someone else who isn't me and with different tastes in music and films?
The price of the hard-drive and nothing more.

VegaLA

Priceless!

If you store photos of loved ones, your own children and your grandparents, home made videos of yourself as a teen larking about with friends and you wake up one morning to find its suddenly zapped from existance then you'll know what I mean.

I had a shitload of my artwork, family photos and some digital backups on CD in my case that I had ransacked from my parents digs back in 2005. On the way there one of my cases came in on a different flight, so my paranoia was at an all time high when I packed to return home, and had my home address on paper in the case as well as written on two seperate labels outside the case.
American Airlines lost my fucking case. They awarded me $700 but fuck it, it would never replace my personal artwork and photos. I have since discovered that when the cases are finally dug up they acution them, so sosme fucker somewhere has my shit and they know who it belongs to because I left my details in the case.

At home I have a SmartStor NAS which has 3 of the 4 drives populated with 1.5 or 2TB drives. I have 3 external drives that backup the most important files and DVDs are stored aat the back of the closet. I also have a drive at a friedns house that backups up home movies, photos an artwork. Just in case, like.

Also, fuck american airlines.

biggytitbo

Its ironic, because of digital obsolescence, that the most well documented period in history might be a total black hole in 10,000 years. Those mutant crabmen stalking a post apocalyptic future wilderness might know more about the Victorian era than they do the facebook era.

Big Jack McBastard

While that's true the platters containing the data could still be in tact, although they might well be mistaken for big washers and so end up being used to help stick rivets together for Crabman bases.