Actually, Imerge have a back-up tool but as you can expect, it requires an equally large storage as the size of your music collection. Note that a full back-up takes a considerable amount of time, as S1000 came in 40 and 80G flavours. The back-up utility is command-line driven, so not the most user-friendly in the world.

In order not to run into problems with copyrights, the back-up is encoded. Contact Imerge for more info.

S2000 does indeed support VBR; choose from 128, 320, PCM or VBR with 192kb/s as average target.

As with S1000 there's no dedicated search funtion on S2000, but by selecting e.g. artist and using numeric keypad for first letter (in similar way as with Empeg), searches are pretyy easy and straightforward.

Cas.