I'm staying away from the whole legal issues being discussed here. Personally, I will continue to buy CD's, use a DA extractor on the CD, then an MP3 compressor on my music even if the RIAA starts cracking down. I don't forsee them hunting down everyone with an MP3 encoder.

Anyhow, I really can't see that many people finding the entire unit backup function useful. Even only with a 6gb disk in mine, the backup image would eat half of my storage on my system. Even going to the largest hard drive for my system (18GB) I would still loose 33% to a backup. And I do have 22 gigs of total space in a linux server, but space there is limited as well, and 6gb disapperaring there is not a thing I need. Trying to keep that backup secure, but easially updatable is going to be hard, and time consuming when updating it.

I definitly want some sort of "easy restore" option for the empeg. And having the empeg somehow find the music it once had would be nice. A "backup" could then fill a meg or so at most, and be easy to manage. To restore in the unlikely event my unit suffers some sort of failure, I can deal with feeding my system my MP3 CD's again. The main thing I worry about now is not losing the music, but losing the tag changes on the unit.

And this brings up a good point, keep your MP3's on CD or other removable media after creation. These discs will have many uses, including the ability to easially restore your music collection to a brand new MKII unit. CD-R drives are as cheap as ever, and much more reliable then before.

My empeg site is:http://24.236.3.131/empeg/