My collection is insured; I have a special rider on my renter's insurance. I'm covered against all kinds of crazy stuff (theft, people suing me for tripping, etc), plus my music collection is covered - about $15 a month.SweetLowdown wrote:
On the other hand . . . when I had about a thousand CD's stolen from a storage locker about 4 years ago (I had stored all of my music when I moved to Italy to work for several months), for all of that money I spent on those albums . . technically I was SOL. Legally, the only recourse I had, aside from the cops finding the bugger who did it and getting my stuff back (which never happened) was to buy it over. This was before the days when I was at all technologically savvy and I hadn't ripped backup copies of anything, I never even made a list of all of the albums (my own stupidity, yes). In subsequent years I have purchased new copies of many of the albums that were lost, but I have also gotten some of it from other DJ's who offered it freely after they heard what happened. Now, technically that was wholly illegal and thoroughly despisable according to most of the opinions here, but I can tell you that I sleep okay at night knowing that I regained some of that music from friends who were also avid collectors and paid money for those albums, too.
I'm obsessive about backups - when I first buy a disc it gets ripped to the HD (after which it doesn't leave the house), which gets backed up every few weeks on an external HD. The external goes into a waterproof/ fireproof safe (fireproof just means it stays under 451F...).
The fireproof safe is only so-so effective for magnetic media (the Curie temperature for , so on top of that every few months I copy the external over onto a (trusted) friend's system. That's a total of 4 places for the music (CD on shelf, HD on tower, HD in safe, HD at friend's) - it ain't cheap, but I've invested a lot in this, and the peace of mind is *so* worth it.
If my collection is ever lost/stolen/destroyed, it's covered, and the bazillions of hours I spent ripping and BPMing songs doesn't go to waste. I don't worry about maintaining a separate list of albums, since I rip according to artist/album, and include label and catalog notes if there's any ambiguity. My insurance company accepts that as a catalog. So they'd just write me a check for [a boatload], and I'd go ahead and make the catalog, submit it to my favorite retailers (online or brick and mortar), and just cross them off the list when they arrived - all the while spinning merrily off of my laptop and compilation discs.