Clouds are not Tangible

If you can’t hold something in your hand, it doesn’t exist

At first, this statement might seem to deny digital media…

In reality, you can store anything digital on physical media, and “hold it in your hand”.

Why is this important?

Today, digital rights and cloud-delivered services often determine what you “own”.

What if the provider goes out of business?  You simply lose all of your rights (and thus all of your purchases).

What if your account gets corrupted?  You lose everything associated with your account.

What if your local content fails to sync with the cloud?  You lose your local content.

Here is what does work:

BACK UP YOUR DATA TO PHYSICAL MEDIA.

Thus, if you can’t hold the physical media in your hand, then your cloud-based digital rights don’t exist.

DRM Corollary: 

If you have a backup that’s encrypted using Digital Rights Management (DRM), then you don’t really have a backup.

Any physical backup should either NOT be encrypted, or should have a permanent decryption key that never expires, and can be used even if the DRM server is offline.

Unless you can DECRYPT your backups, they are useless.