Tusk is a Mac app that automatically backs up your project folders to multiple locations and tracks where every file lives — even when your drives aren't connected.
Streaming in 2026 is a dozen apps with rotating catalogs. The show you were halfway through moves to a service you don't pay for, the album you love vanishes from the catalog, the movie that was "included" last month is a rental this month. Buying feels like the escape hatch. Pay once, keep it forever.
Except that's often not what buying means anymore. A purchase on Audible, a movie "bought" in a streaming store, a delisted game: in most of these cases you bought a license to access the file while the service exists and the terms hold. The file itself was never yours.
The fix has two steps, and most people stop after the first. Step one is buying downloadable, ideally DRM-free media where it exists. Step two is treating those downloads like the irreplaceable files they are: multiple verified copies, on storage you control. Buying is when you pay. Custody starts when the file sits on your drive with a backup you've checked.
TL;DR: A digital purchase is usually a license, and licenses end: stores shut down, catalogs rotate, accounts get locked. Where you can, buy downloadable or DRM-free files and download them immediately. Then keep at least two verified copies on storage you control, for example one external drive plus one cloud bucket. A backup tool that verifies every copy, like Tusk, turns a folder of purchases into a library that survives any single store, drive, or account.
What you actually get when you buy digital media
Read the terms of any major digital storefront and the pattern repeats: you're granted a personal, non-transferable license to access the content through their apps. Audible's Conditions of Use are typical. Your audiobook library exists inside Audible's ecosystem, there's no supported export to open files, and your access depends on the account and the service staying in good standing.
This isn't a hypothetical risk. There's a track record:
- Microsoft's ebook store closed in 2019 and every purchased book stopped working. Microsoft issued refunds, which was decent of them and also proved the point: they could switch your library off, so it was never really yours.
- Nintendo closed the Wii U and 3DS eShops in 2023. Games you'd bought remained downloadable for a while, but the store, and any purchase you hadn't downloaded, went away on Nintendo's schedule, not yours.
- Streaming "purchases" get delisted. Movies bought through TV storefronts have disappeared from libraries when licensing between the studio and the store changed. The store decides what "forever" means.
- Accounts get locked. A Google account suspension can take your entire purchase history with it, as in the case of a parent locked out of everything over a false flag. When your library lives inside an account, your library is one automated decision away from gone.
None of this makes buying pointless. It makes buying step one of two.
Which purchases you can actually keep
Be honest about the categories, because they're not equal:
Fully archivable. DRM-free music (Bandcamp, Qobuz downloads, HDtracks), DRM-free ebooks (publishers like Tor, direct-from-author stores, Humble Bundle books), GOG games, PDFs, comics from DRM-free stores. You download real files. These are yours in every meaningful sense, as long as the files survive.
Archivable with effort. Blu-rays and CDs you rip yourself, box sets of a series you actually care about. Physical media doubles as its own offline backup, and the ripped files go into the same library as everything else.
Not archivable, know it going in. Audible audiobooks, most movie purchases inside streaming ecosystems, Kindle books with DRM, console game purchases. You can't archive what you can't download as a usable file. Keep buying them if the convenience is worth it, but count them as long-term rentals, not as part of your library.
The workflow below is for the first two categories. Pretending the third category is fixable would be selling you something.
Downloading is not the same as keeping
Here's where most people stop too early. The files are downloaded, they're in a folder, done. Two problems with that:
One copy is zero copies. A single drive holding the only copy of ten years of purchases is a single point of failure. Drives die without warning, and the annualized failure rates in Backblaze's drive stats apply to your drive too.
Sync is not backup. If your library folder lives in a synced cloud folder, a deletion or ransomware encryption syncs everywhere within minutes. We wrote about this failure mode in detail in cloud storage is not a backup. Sync gives you access from anywhere; it does not give you an independent copy.
The standard that works is the same 3-2-1 rule used for irreplaceable footage: three copies, two different storage types, one offsite. For a media library on a Mac, the practical shape is the working copy on your Mac or a primary external drive, a second copy on another external drive, and a third in a cloud bucket you control, like Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2 (we compared costs in B2 vs Wasabi vs R2; at B2's $6/TB/month, an offsite copy of a 500 GB library runs about $3 a month).
A Mac workflow for a library you'll still have in 2036
You don't need a NAS, TrueNAS, or a homelab. One external drive and one cloud bucket cover the realistic failure modes.
1. One folder per media type. Music, Movies, Books, Audiobooks-DRM-free, Games. Loose downloads scattered across ~/Downloads are how libraries quietly rot. If you're unsure how much space you'll need, this sizing guide has the math.
2. Download at purchase time, not "someday." Stores close and delist. The Microsoft ebook customers who lost their libraries were the ones who had no reason to expect the store would close. Make downloading part of buying.
3. Make each folder a tracked project. This is where Tusk fits. Each media folder becomes a project with two backup destinations, say the external drive ARCHIVE_01 and a B2 bucket. Tusk copies every file to both and verifies each transfer with a BLAKE3 checksum, so a copy only counts once the bytes are confirmed intact. From then on it watches the folder: buy an album, drop it in Music, and it's on its way to both destinations without you touching anything.
4. Check the file table, not your memory. The question "is my stuff actually backed up?" gets a visible answer: per-file, per-destination status, including for drives that are unplugged and sitting in a drawer. Years from now, that beats trying to remember whether you ever copied the 2026 purchases to the archive drive.
5. Free up your Mac without losing anything. A media library outgrows a laptop SSD fast. Once files show verified copies on both destinations, Tusk's Delete local removes the local copies and keeps tracking the backups. It physically checks every destination first and refuses if any file isn't fully backed up. The library stays complete; your Mac stays usable. When you want the files back, Restore pulls them from the fastest available source.
The same honesty as above applies to the tool: Tusk backs up and tracks files, it is not a media server. Pair it with Plex, Jellyfin, or Apple's apps for playback. And it can't liberate DRM-locked purchases; nothing can, legally.
The uncomfortable summary
Every "buy" button is a bet that the store outlives your interest in the content. Sometimes that's a fine bet. But for the media you'd genuinely miss, the box-set series, the discography you've collected for a decade, the ebook library, betting on a storefront's corporate longevity is optional. Files on your own storage, in open formats, with verified copies in two places, don't care which services exist in 2036.
Buy it, download it, back it up. The first step is a transaction. The other two are what make it yours.
FAQ
Usually not. Most digital storefronts sell a license to access content through their apps, not the file itself. Audible, Kindle (DRM titles), and streaming-store movie purchases all work this way: access depends on the store existing and your account staying active. Purchases you download as DRM-free files (Bandcamp music, GOG games, DRM-free ebooks) are the exception; those are real files you control.
Yes, and it has repeatedly. Microsoft's ebook store closed in 2019 and all purchased books stopped working. Nintendo closed the Wii U and 3DS eShops in 2023. Streaming stores have delisted movies people had bought. Account suspensions can also cut off an entire purchase library at once.
Organize downloads into one folder per media type (Music, Movies, Books), then follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two storage types, one offsite. In practice that's the files on your Mac or a primary drive, a copy on an external drive, and a copy in a cloud bucket like Backblaze B2. A backup tool like Tusk automates this per folder: it copies to both destinations, verifies every file with a BLAKE3 checksum, and keeps watching for new purchases.
Sync alone isn't backup. If files are deleted or corrupted locally, the sync service faithfully replicates that everywhere within minutes, and an account lockout takes the cloud copy with it. Cloud storage works well as one of your backup destinations, ideally a bucket you control (B2, R2, S3) rather than the account your whole digital life runs through.
Not in a supported way. Audible has no export to open files, and DRM-protected Kindle books are locked to Amazon's ecosystem. Treat DRM-locked purchases as long-term rentals. For audiobooks and ebooks you want to genuinely keep, buy from DRM-free stores where possible and archive the downloaded files.
Less than most subscriptions. At Backblaze B2's $6 per TB per month, a 500 GB library costs about $3 a month to keep offsite; Cloudflare R2 and Wasabi are in the same range. The external drive for the second local copy is a one-time purchase, roughly $50 to $100 per 2 TB in 2026.