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

@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.

Kijanki,

Pardon my ignorance, but, how do you actually work the second drive at the office approach? I have a NAS at home with mirror drives, but, of course that is hardly protection against something really bad (like someone stealing the whole unit). I would really hate having to re-rip my collection (I am currently about half way through 4,000 cds, and this is turning out to be a LOT of work).

Do you somehow stream the data to your office hard drives or do you take the hard drives out of your home unit to take to the office, or. . . . As you can see, I am someone who needs an idiot's guide to how this is done.