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


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So, you've ripped your entire collection of CDs to the hard drive, and you're blissfully streaming music for hours without having to fetch the silver discs. Everything was transferred with 'bit perfect' perfection.

What did you do with your collection of physical media?

If you've kept the CD collection, why?

If you got rid of the collection, why?, and what did you do with it?

Trying to make a decision here.
rhanson739
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.
I bring drive home every time I feel it needs to be updated. I alternate drives remembering which drive was updated last. I decide to update when I add more than 10 CDs. In worst case when I loose original drive and one backup I can be 20 CDs behind but that's not bad.
Larry, just buy an external hard drive having an interface that can connect to one of your home computers, such as USB, Firewire, or eSATA. Connect it to one of those computers, that can access the NAS, and use the computer to copy the files from the NAS to it. Then simply store the drive at another location, such as your office, and bring it home from time to time to copy newly ripped files onto it.

One caution in selecting the drive is that older operating systems, such as Windows XP, will have problems working with drives that are larger than 2 TB (or more precisely, larger than 2.19 TB). Before you finish ripping your 4000 CDs you'll probably find yourself exceeding that size. If you are using XP, or a Mac OS that pre-dates Tiger (which was released in 2005), you would want to get multiple external drives that are each 2 TB or less, rather than anything larger.

NewEgg.com is a great place from which to buy these and other kinds of computer accessories and parts. Here is a link to their listings of 300+ external hard drives, which you can narrow down to suit your requirements using the guided search feature at the left of the screen. Be sure to note the "More Options" link in that feature.

Best regards,
-- Al