Specifically, I want to hear from tech enthusiests, data hoarders, and those with background in IT.

cracks knuckles

Short answer: both.

Long answer: rule #1 of data hoarding - never, ever, EVER keep only one copy of your data. A wise man once told me that if you only have a single copy of your data on a bare storage drive, you might as well toss it out the window. Drive failure? All gone. Fire, flood, tornado? All gone. Robbery? All gone.

I think you get the point. Many data hoarders live by the "1-2-3" rule of data storage, meaning that you want 3 copies of your data:

#1 - Originals. Everything on your primary storage drives.
#2 - Digital backup. A carbon copy of the above "everything" in cloud storage.
#3 - Offsite backup. Physical carbon copy of the originals which you do not necessarily have regular access to, but can access at will.

I'm going on a decade-plus of avid data hoarding. I've lost a ton of personal data and have learned many lessons the hard way over the years. You're in luck: in this day and age, storage media is relatively inexpensive. For instance, I got a 4TB 3.5" HDD for $60 from Amazon this past Black Friday - something like that easily retailed for hundreds as recently as 10-15 years ago.

I could go on, and on, and on about how important it is to always back up your data, but I'll spare you a lecture. Google results for "DataHoarder" should easily lead you to a place full of wisdom where you can learn more, but these are the basics.

Both. Books and video games I prefer physical, for the experience of using them while videos, pictures, and music I prefer digital because I can copy/stream them on most of my devices - convenience basically.

I'm quite 'old fashioned' when it comes to technology and elsewhere, I've described myself as a 'technophobe'.

I prefer physical storage simply because that's what I understand and what I'm most used to. I appreciate digital storage may offer more, but it's all a bit too complicated for me.

"If you have one, you have none."

Physical storage as I realize this is old, but for various reasons I fall right into the group the OP was asking about. I prefer physical storage, large hard drives are cheap, I can make backups easily and store a copy off site, and when you’re dealing with huge files, potentially totaling a few terabytes a day, the cloud isn’t really an option if you’re working for or are a small business. And yes, the 3-2-1 rule is what you should strive for if you value your data, whether it’s pregnancy fetish material or family photos.

Multiple backups of varying methods is my only method now. I learned my lesson the hard way and lost some legendary content forever.

Well for me, as much as I love playing video games, this is the thing, with physical games you can always trade them at gamestop or other stores who do the same, but if you buy a digital game, you can't trade it in, it's in your account on your system, but it's like when you to a 3rd party store and they have everything from vintage gaming system and up to date and you see a old school game and it's hard to find, you know you gonna get it. So it's real hard to say for me.

(April 16, 2024, 3:41 pm)Stretchedtummy Multiple backups of varying methods is my only method now. I learned my lesson the hard way and lost some legendary content forever.

Oh, just because I prefer physical backups doesn’t mean that I don’t make multiple backups or keep geographical backups of my data as well. I typically use hard drives given the volume of data I normally deal with, (if tape drives didn’t cost a fortune I would have one of those as well,) but anything important is on at least two of them with a third copy in some form on another form of media.

(April 16, 2024, 5:46 pm)golion05 Well for me, as much as I love playing video games, this is the thing, with physical games you can always trade them at gamestop or other stores who do the same, but if you buy a digital game, you can't trade it in, it's in your account on your system, but it's like when you to a 3rd party store and they have everything from vintage gaming system and up to date and you see a old school game and it's hard to find, you know you gonna get it. So it's real hard to say for me.

For video games I almost universally prefer physical copies, especially after seeing how digital copies have aged in comparison to them. If I want to play an old NES game that’s relatively obscure, I can fire up one of my still functioning NES consoles and play the game as if it were 30 years ago still. With digital games I’ve already run into issues with older games on older systems not necessarily functioning any longer, or not being available to redownload if a backup failed, or other similar issues that just don’t occur with physical games. I’m particularly concerned with how the DS/3DS handheld lines will hold up over time though. Unlike disc-based consoles, or Nintendo’s other cartridge-based systems (including the Switch,) which use a technology known as mask ROMs to store their data, the DS/3DS use the same rewritable NAND flash found in things like phones and SD Cards for at least part if not all of their cartridges, and some of them (albeit admittedly ones with a known manufacturing flaw,) have already failed in a way that mask ROMs have proven that they don’t. NAND is not suitable for long term storage, so it’s kind of concerning that nearly 20 years worth of handheld games could just disappear from being stored on a lousy format.

Definitely both. But it’s worrisome to know that a video game publisher can just take any digital only game offline at a whim.