TECH NEWS – If you don’t have enough space on Google Drive (15 GB), you may want to use another service, but with a flick of the wrist, you can lose all your data.

Google Drive is fast and reliable enough, but it only offers 15 gigabytes for free. That’s not enough to store 1080p or 4K videos for your clients if you’re editing, so you’ll have to pay a pretty penny for more storage space, or you can use Alphabet’s video hosting service, YouTube! We can also store our data in video form, and although this is not the first time we have heard of such a solution for YouTube, it is the first time we have heard of it.

Hackaday featured DvorakDwatf’s idea, and since March 31 has become World Backup Day (the day you should put your saved data somewhere safe), it’s perhaps even apt that you can store your bytes as pixel data on YouTube. DworakDwarf pointed out on GitHub that this idea should not be deployed as mass storage as a gimmick and that you can learn from data compression this way. Therefore, there are bugs that he does not want to fix, and not without reason, as the uploader might be close enough to violate the YouTube terms of use.

He wrote the code in Rust and turned the data into pixels to be played as a video. (Remember when we could use cassettes for the C64, for example? They stored the data as sound.) It initially used the entire RGB spectrum for more efficient encoding, but YouTube’s compression on colored pixels hurt, so a binary mode is also recommended. It can also cause compression problems, is bulkier in size, and is time-consuming but produces more reliable results.

However, YouTube’s algorithms may notice it and suspend your account, not to mention that uploading and processing huge videos can be time-consuming. So you might want to try an old abandonware game that you can download for free because it won’t take up gigabytes of space…

Source: PCGamer