Digital Stream, Is it to soon to make the switch??

How to make a flood?

Not too hard to get flooded. The house can be too close to a river or other body of water or you can have a accumulation of surface waters from a heavy rain. Google "downtown houston floods" for some pictures of a major metropolitan downtown area under water.

- that was a joke.

Thanks for the clarification. Sometimes it's hard to tell.

Try this perspective - at least with a hard drive system you can easily make a backup copy.

You can do that with CDs, but it is a lot more time and work plus more storage space.

As for vinyl, what's the game plan if you have a fire at your home or burglars steal or vandalize your collection? I've had more than one friend who has lost a significant number of LPs stored in their basement from sewer backup.

I keep two backups of the music on my server. I keep one in a different room at home and another off-premises. If I somehow lose all three at once I figure I've got bigger problems in my life to deal with.

Not to belabor the point too much, but things do happen. In looking at insurance claim statistics, there were over 400,000 house fires in 2008. Over the past 10 years, the average number of flood claims from outside water sources has been over 50,000 a year. Wind damage, theft and interior water damage claims (frozen or burst pipes, etc.) are also each in the hundreds of thousands per year.

So make sure you have a backup that is away from your premises. If you do have a big loss at your home you'll have a lot of other stuff to worry about initially, but at some point down the road it'll be a lot faster and easier to copy the off-premises backup to a new server than to rebuild your collection from scratch.

Banks, insurance companies and a host of other businesses keep a large percentage of their vital data on hard drives. The secret is backups at different locations.