My personal story doesn’t have any depth. I was born, went on to college and worked, fought and, finally, made it online. But it does contain some devastating moments where I believed that my life was done. One of these was when the computer in my house suddenly stopped functioning. After some tweaking, installing an entirely new desktop and moving the hard drive from one to the other, I was finally capable of restoring all the files saved on the drive. It took 3 days of sweating, literally crying… I’ve learned one thing. It is possible to automate or manually back up my work from the day using Dropbox and personal ftp servers so nothing can ever be deleted.
This is not the ideal option. The more data you keep online, the more money is required to keep it all on the internet. It’s simple and appears safe. Also, it’s accessible, can be downloaded anywhere you have access to internet access. But what happens where WiFi or another internet connection isn’t available? I’m grateful to always have my laptop on me in those instances. It’s my only safe harbour for backups. There are 2 drives connected as a RAID stack which means they copy each other and make sure that 1 copy is left in case one of the two HDDs goes broken. Since I copy the majority of my files there, it is rare that the laptop works. I do not wish for two drives to be destroyed on the same day.
My other great day of sorrow came few years ago. As I said above, I make sure not to lose my work. I have now copied the work multiple times and keep it accessible wherever internet access is available. This was Periscope. I was using it quite a bit in the past. Even during the recent summer 2020 riots, I participated in some live streaming streams. Periscope TV closed suddenly and all streams will disappear within a couple of weeks. What can I do? All the videos need to be downloaded onto my laptop so that they can be saved offline. These are dear to me. This is the last time we hung out with my friend.
It’s a site I regularly go to. It allows me to download video from Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook which are the other sites that host my live streaming. I am into politics and underground movements, which is why I often film live events, then save them for the future and then publish them on my YouTube channel, and each time live is done, I backup it up into my laptop. This is just what I do. It lets me share videos across multiple platforms. It allows me to share a YouTube video on Facebook however, I can also upload the video to Facebook. Each video is a separate video. It’s amazing the amount of live streams have I produced over the last eight years. I currently have three TB. Periscope lives aren’t lost.. This site has been very useful to me.
It works as a angel. When I play a video I wish to download on Periscope, Youtube or Facebook and copy the URL using the share link. Then, I go to the website for downloading videos then paste the video URL there, and in a matter of seconds I’ll see a variety of choices for downloading videos. I can download the video to my desktop or laptop, and copy it across platforms, and then save it for my loved ones. Periscope is not available on all sites. The site is able to manage the m3u8 file other sites download for you. I go to the video downloader site and copy my video’s URL in the location they prefer. After that, I hit the on the big button. Video doesn’t download to my computer, it’s on the internet and it plays online when player loads tiny fragments each time.
In case you were not aware, the Windows copy command will allow you to connect these fragments and create a normal length video file. This is due to MpegTS, the video format that is used to split the video fragments. Also called transport stream. It contains all the data necessary for decoding video within each fragment. Each stream is initiated from the middle without interruption. The program also stores data on the browser, as it downloads 360×10 second files instead of the 1hr files. That means that even if you only watch 25 seconds of the stream, it will download only 4-6 fragments. (It gets 3-4 fragments of the current 25 second stretch plus 1-2 subsequent fragments if you keep watching the stream). This reduces the total download time, as it only downloads 25 seconds from the beginning of the stream.
