Ownership of one’s personal data is a topic close to my heart, and data perservation/integrity are an important aspect of it.
I think there is a strong correlation between the generation one is born in and what medium one is most comfortable with for primary storage of one’s data.
Take one’s music, or movies, or photographs. In 2020, someone who is in their fifties or older is more likely than someone younger to think their data is most safe in physical form – for music and movies, as audio cassettes or VHS tapes or CDs/DVDs. For photographs, as physical albums.
They are also less likely to read e-books, even on an e-ink Kindle. Anecdotally for me, people who are older don’t contrast e-books and physical books the way some younger people who have preferences do. They don’t talk about the feel of books, their smell, their heft, the uniquness of type or cover, their non-distractive nature. No, they just seem to be unable to consider an e-book a book. It seems to be a conceptual barrier.
All of this is usually instinctive – it’s not that they don’t like technology per se. It’s merely familiarity with the media that they stored and managed their first music, movies and photos in.
Personally, while I had my own audio cassettes, my first camera was a digital one – the good-for-its-time 5MP Sony W1. My first movies were CDs that I ripped to my hard drive. So I’m natively comfortable with my media being digital, that isn’t true of streaming services.
I like to have my music in my iTunes folder, with all of the playlists I’ve made and ratings, ID3 tags and album art I’ve added over nearly twenty years (it was near-impossible to fetch meta information for Hindi and Marathi film music from the 50s to the 80s back then). I’m much more comfortble with my photos in iPhoto (now Photos), similarly organized into albums, on my Mac. Because open formats are important to me, I am concerned about the single daabase that is my iPhoto Library. And finally, I continue to store my movies and TV shows as files on my hard drive, although it has gotten very hard and increasingly expensive to buy movies/TV shows – even iTunes is now skewed heavily towards Apple+ and streaming.