Freedom through digitization

I've been working on a project for a few months now.  Just a background thing, really, as I have time for it.  I'm taking all the music I have on CD and ripping it to my hard drive.  Digitizing the collection, we librarians call it.  I know, I know, I'm not technically a librarian right now, but I have a degree, I may as well use it now and then, even if it's just to establish that I know a little bit of what I'm talking about.

I'm mostly done with this project.  I now have a stack of CDs sitting here, ready to go to the secondhand store.  If I get a few dollars for them I'll be happy.  I'll be more happy to not have to store them in the house anymore.  I'll be even more happy to not have to pack them up and drag them around the next time I move.

Why bother?  Beyond saving the untold dollars that buying it all from a commercial service would cost(I've already paid for them once, so why pay a second time?), I'm able to put all this on at least two different hard drives, so in event of an unplanned disaster, I will still have it all available.  I had an external hard drive fail just a few months ago, and may have lost hundreds of photos.  Still waiting on the recovery efforts for that one, so I don't know the final result yet, but it did spur me to action.  New hard drive in hand, another old hard drive cleaned up and reformatted, all sorts of backups done now.  That's right, I said "unplanned disaster."  Is there any other kind?

Next up on the digitization horizon?  Photos.  I've just finished looking through my parent's house and they have album after album of photos of my siblings and I.  Seems like my entire youth was documented on film, especially the embarrassing parts.  But after seeing the aftermath of Super Storm Sandy, and how people were absolutely despondent over the loss of not just their homes but all their belongings, including photos of loved ones.  I don't know why, but it sparked another random thought in my head that maybe the time to digitize is now, before something happens.

Once the music is done, the photos are next.  One big digital archive for me, and the freedom to know that unless I lose all the digital copies at the same time, I'm covered.