Large external hard drives are becoming quite affordable, and you can transfer a lot of data to them quite rapidly (at least compared to the old days!). The master copies of everything I've recorded (and some cassettes I've converted to CD for friends) are on the hard drive of my computer, with copies on one or more of the external drives we have at home - and on the set of external drives we keep at Charley's mom's house just in case some disaster strikes our house.

I doubt if the life expectancy of an individual hard drive is all that great (at least when compared with the 78s I inherited from my parents and the 45s of my youth) - but with the redundancy factor we built in, I'm comfortable with that as a strategy.

Probably a bit of thread drift, but if you do have irreplaceable stuff on your computer, I think that having fairly current backup copies stored out of range of any probable disasters that could befall your computer is a really good idea.

JudyB