Own the Copy: Why Physical Media Belongs in a Preparedness Plan

In a recent video, musician and producer Rick Beato makes a simple case: keep the media that matters to you. He shows decades of LPs, CDs, cassettes, DAT tapes, photographs, computers and the machines needed to play them. His wider point is not nostalgia. A subscription gives convenient access, but a copy in your possession gives you continuity when a catalogue changes, an account closes, a service disappears or the network is unavailable.

Access is not the same as possession

Streaming and cloud libraries are excellent access tools, but they remain dependencies: on a provider, a licence, an account, a payment method and a working connection. A bought book, record or disc can still be read or played without asking a remote service for permission. For preparedness, the useful distinction is not analogue versus digital. It is dependent access versus a copy you can reach and use yourself.

The original is evidence — but it is not immortal

An original pressing, first edition, family photograph or master recording preserves a particular version and its context. Keep it. But paper burns, tape sheds, discs scratch and drives fail. Playback equipment and proprietary software also disappear. The Library of Congress therefore treats preservation as both care for the physical object and conversion of vulnerable audiovisual material into maintained, current formats.

Build a preservation stack

1. Keep the physical original when it has cultural, evidential or sentimental value.
2. Create a high-quality access copy: lossless audio where practical, high-resolution images, and a disc image or complete file copy for data media.
3. Keep an ordinary, easy-to-open version as well as the preservation master.
4. Record basic metadata: who, what, where, when, format and any story that will otherwise be forgotten.
5. Store three copies on two kinds of media, with one copy off-site.
6. Keep one copy offline, test restores and migrate before hardware or formats become obsolete.

Use 3-2-1, not one magic disc

The 3-2-1 rule is deliberately boring: three copies, two different media types, one copy off-site. A practical household version might be the original plus a local external drive and an encrypted off-site drive or cloud copy. No medium has to be perfect because no single failure can take everything.

Preserve the playback path

• Keep a tested player or reader for unusual formats while affordable replacements still exist.
• Store cables, adapters, power supplies and any licence keys with the collection.
• For old computers, preserve installers, manuals and an exported copy in an open format.
• Test a sample every year; a backup that has never been opened is only a hope.
• Prioritise unique material first: family recordings, photographs, masters, research and personal writing.

The Library of Congress’s Tangible Media Project demonstrates the same principle at institutional scale: it creates bit-for-bit images of discs and also extracts browsable file trees. One copy preserves the object’s complete digital structure; the other keeps the contents easy to use.

A one-weekend preservation plan

1. Choose the ten items or folders you would be most upset to lose.
2. Clean and store the originals in a cool, dry, stable place away from sunlight.
3. Digitise or copy them at the best practical quality; do not discard the originals.
4. Name files consistently and add a short text file with dates, people and context.
5. Make a second local copy and one encrypted copy away from home.
6. Open random files from every copy, note the test date and schedule the next annual check.