Now That You've Ripped Your Entire Collection...

"Jult52: I read about audiophiles dispensing with their CDs and I am puzzled by the excessive amount of confidence they have in their physical harddrives and the ability to decode them."

Last year I had 2 laptops and a backup drive die within a few weeks of each other. People need to learn the hard way. I did.

@David12:

Who's going to know if you ripped the CD's?

My brother and two other hobbyists has a full copy of all drives, all my CDs are in storage bins. I don't sell my music, just listen.

I'm at roughly the halfway point in my ripping program. I am keeping everything. First, I still use CDs in the car. Second, I haven't yet been able to fully trust hard drives, even with backups. Even when I eventually upgrade to a solid state drive, and even if I start using SDcards or USB thumb drives in the car, I will keep my CDs as the ultimate backup. Of course, it's not much reassurance: It's taken me 18 months to rip half of my CDs, so it's a 3-year project (accurately tagging my CDs, especially the home-made ones and needle-drops, is very time consuming). I don't think I'd ever want to do this a second time. I am seriously thinking about a second backup hard drive.

Bondmanp, I have second hard drive backup just in case of controller failure (or my mistake) during backup process, that can damage both drives - source and backup. I also keep second drive at my work (fire, theft). For these reasons I don't believe in RAID drive mirroring. In addition I keep original CDs.