Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
now support streaming video from the likes of the iTunes Store,
Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon—often at 1080p. At the same time,
DVD rentals and downloadable movies and TV shows are becoming
less common. Although this arguably represents a (temporary) step
backward in quality and flexibility, and sometimes a higher cost, it
may also mean that you accumulate less video content that needs
to be backed up.
•
New iOS devices have different backup needs.
Apple
now sells a 128 GB iPad, which is astonishing considering some
MacBook Air models have only 64 GB of storage. Other high-
capacity iOS devices are bound to appear. You can now use iCloud
instead of iTunes for backup and syncing iOS devices, if you prefer,
which may reduce the amount of storage space you need on your
Mac, at the cost of longer transfer times.
•
iTunes Match can keep your tunes in the cloud.
For $24.99
per year, iCloud members can subscribe to iTunes Match, which
gives you an online copy of all your music, including not only music
you purchased from the iTunes Store but even tracks you ripped
from a CD or recorded yourself. For many users, iTunes Match may
be the most logical way to keep an offsite backup of their music—
and it may reduce your need for other local and cloud storage. See
the sidebar
iTunes Match and Music Backups
for more details.
Storage Media Choices Are Changing
Everyone expects media capacities to increase over time, but other new
considerations may also affect one's choice of backup media:
•
Hard drives are larger.
Nothing surprising there—hard drive
sizes are always on the rise. You can now easily find individual 3.5-
inch drive mechanisms that hold up to 4 TB, and 2.5-inch
mechanisms that hold up to 2 TB. Strangely, the largest drive
currently available directly from Apple in a build-to-order new Mac
is still only 2 TB, which is unchanged since 2011. Meanwhile, the
price of storage per gigabyte has remained fairly steady—a new 2 TB
drive mechanism still costs about $100, just as it did two years ago.
