Thumb drives, Zip drives, USB drives … call them what you will. It all depends what size you buy.
It’s very cheap and easy to buy 64GB drives now. Even 128GB drives are not all that expensive these days.
I don’t understand how so many people can be telling you that you need two drives or three drives without even asking what size drives you will buy.
I have two 32GB drives and 4 64GB drives. I use them for all kinds of stuff and they are so inexpensive that it’s worth having a few around.
I always keep one on my keychain - encrypted of course. In that way if I ever get robbed, I will always have my personal data - either at home or on my key chain.
Are we reading the same thread? Posters here have been clear about how much storage is required for uncompressed and compressed audio, and why multiple storage units would be a good idea, and it has nothing to do with how much you have to backup but rather for redundancy. Anything I want worth keeping is on at least two different hard drives.
If you wish to avoid lossy compression, I’d still use lossless compression like FLAC, which would at average reduce the storage space by a factor of 2. You could probably keep it on a 32GB stick. Seeing as most CDs don’t use all 700MB or 80 minutes, you probably would then have enough to put lossless copies on there, too, for using in players that don’t support FLAC.
And rather than getting two, I’d probably also put the files on your hard drive. And then use Backblaze to back up your computer for $5 a month (per computer).
I don’t know why you’d need to worry about backing up in case of loss and stuff. He didn’t say throw out, he said retire. 80 CD’s don’t take up so much space that you couldn’t pack them neatly in a box and shove it to the back of a closet or storage locker. I’d call that retiring. And if that’s not what was meant, it should have been.
True, but if he loses the data he’ll have to rip all the CDs again. Although 80 discs is not really that many. When I got my first iPhone to use as my car stereo I too relinquished all my CDs to long-term archive storage status. But I have about 300 discs and did not want to have to re-rip them all, so I just use a cloud backup service (Mozy) for all my PC’s data.
That would be my recommendation, just rip them onto your PC’s hard disk and use a cloud-based backup service for it’s data.
Are the CDs rare, or are they owned by millions of people and readily downloadable from dozens of websites?
Don’t get me wrong; I have my media on a laptop, and backed up on a hard-drive which I back up on another hard-drive, and I also back up the most precious files on two cloud websites. That all composes of 3/400 albums, 200+ movies and thousands of photos. The photos I wouldn’t be able to ‘get back’ if lost but 99% of the rest I could, although it would be a very tiresome and laborious process.