Yesterday we posted about some of the best sites for downloading free digital content such as ebooks, movies and music.
Of course, you still have to pay to download some of the best content, and many regular downloaders will have spent small fortunes downloading the latest singles and albums on sites such as iTunes.
Sainsbury’s Home Insurance have estimated that as much as £1.3billion worth of digital downloads are now sitting on computers around the country, which apparently works out at an average of £85 per downloader.
In days gone by, when your record collection consisted of a physical product (such as cassettes, remember them?), you’d have been wise to make sure it was covered by your home insurance in case of fire or theft. But nowadays, only a quarter of home insurance policies will cover you should your collection be nicked (presumably if your PC got stolen) or if your house burned, down taking your collection with it.
To be honest, your MP3s probably won’t be at the top of your insurance list (you have one of those, right?), but if you do find yourself spending a lot of your money on these downloads, it’s worth thinking what would happen in these situations. Most download sites will let you redownload one track, but won’t allow you to redownload your whole collection.
If your downloads aren’t covered by insurance, you should seriously consider making backups of your downloads. You could do this by copying them to a DVD, transferring them to another PC, or by using one of the many online backup tools, such as Mozy, to keep a copy of your files. This is a good practice to get into with other important files on your PC.
photo credit: Steve.Maw
The insuring of digital content is a really interesting concept. Surely it’s going to be too easy for people to commit fraud though for the insurers to ever really provide full coverage? (They may currently, but it must be a niche market who are specifying they want it).
Personally I think it’s another argument for keeping everything in ‘the cloud’ (including my head…)