Surprised Ctrl-F turned up zero occurrences of “copyright”. It is legal to back up CDs (which have no copy protection that would fall under DMCA), provided one keeps the originals. And I haven’t heard of an individual getting prosecuted for backing up copy-protected discs like DVDs.

I keep my originals, for legal reasons. I wish I didn’t have to keep the atoms around, but I feel like I do.

I do 4-1-1.

Two full external USB external hard drive backups at home (using a multi-drive USB case of course), ping-ponged so that if an accidentally deleted file is also deleted on the most recent backup, I can go to the previous backup.

A third full external USB external hard drive back-up off-site that gets rotated periodically into the home backups.

So I don’t believe in “two different types of media”. My opinion is that was coined back in the day when it was assumed tape would be the primary backup. The days of tape for home-sized NAS’s are over, as of 2010 when hard drives briefly became cheaper than even blank tapes. (Then the Thailand monsoon hit in 2011 and the prices spiked, but now prices are comparatively low again).