However, this transience is also its most serious problem. There probably isn't a computer user alive today who hasn't lost something important to a hard drive crash, or unfortunate accidental deletion, or even destruction of the media the data was stored upon. If you haven't backed up your information, it could conceivably vanish at any time, and that's scary to a lot of people. This is one of the reasons why the public hasn't largely adopted digital distribution; the actual process is far from foolproof.

What if you're in the middle of a huge download and you lose connection? What if the power goes out? Some of the better download services offer the ability to resume a download from the point when it was interrupted, but not all of them do. And although modern computers do offer storage capacity unheard of even ten years ago, if you're a fan of digital media, you will run out of space sooner or later. This is a problem more for the connected console audience than the PC users, but eventually, it happens to everyone.

What if you get a corrupted download, and can't get the game maker to comp you a new one? You're out the price of a new game; you can't just take the game disc to the store you purchased it from and get them to trade a working one for it. You also can't just let a friend borrow the game; DRM being what it is these days, there's likely all sorts of hocus pocus in the way of your being friendly and loaning your games out the way you used to do with cassettes, CDs, and DVDs. Of course, under strict oversight, you're probably not supposed to have been doing that with music media either, but that never stopped anyone.