[dude87]

I'm in the process of getting rid of all of my CDs and converting everything to hard disk, using a PC connected to my stereo (and TV) for playback. I've built a PC with a pair of internal Western Digital TB drives - one as a primary, one as a backup. I thought about using RAID 1, but decided that a regular backup schedule was probably better for what I'm doing - the backup drive only needs to spin when I'm copying files to it, otherwise it's idle. After I fill up the TB drive I'll get a second pair of TB drives and put them in a machine intended just as a storage host.

All digital media will fail eventually - hard drives, CDs, DVDs, whatever. I figure having a backup copy of my hard drive saves me from a hard drive failure - I can just swap in the backup and buy a new backup drive to replace it. If the PC itself gets physically destroyed, wiping out both hard drives, I figure I'd have lost whatever DVD backups as well - I'm not at the point of investing in off-site storage. If that were to happen I would just rely on "massive parallel backups" - don't horde stuff, make sure plenty of people have copies of whatever you have and, if worse comes to worse, you're downloading a whole lot of shit all over again.