My advice is to have multiple strategies when you back up.
1) keep the cd, burn downloaded files to a CDR/DVDR or some medium that you won't use unless you need to recover.
2) have a local backup that's automated
3) Use an offsite solution like backblaze, crashplan, etc
4) replace your backup drive before it wears out and then either send it to a closet or better yet a safe-deposit box...
Besides the occasional HDD wearing out, the main issue i've noticed with the music files have been file corruption. My last restore, I noticed 3 music files were 0 bytes and they were corrupt, but my local and offsite backups also had the corrupted file and I had to recover from the CD and a few videos from an old drive.
Also keep in mind that all online backup solutions are not perfect and they offer no way to rescan your files to see if the backup matches what is stored.. Sounds odd i know, but it's true. They rely on a "notification" feature managed by the OS.. so when a file changes it gets scheduled to be backed up... but only if the file is noticed to change by the OS. I lost a few files on a restore with backblaze a while ago, the only way i was able to recover it was option 4
.. I have a post around here somewhere that details the issue I had with backblaze...
Jim
