Hey, Ice Man (and a fellow Georgian to boot!), you may want to start by checking where your files are going, should be a shared folder that's gets set up during installation, check under tools>options>saving to see exactly where your files are going. Then, I would suggest you either burn a CD of the content of that folder or run a backup, in case of any catastrophic accidents that could occur. To answer your question, yes, they do occupy space on your hard drive, so you would need to manage it accordingly. I'm going through something like that right now, I'm approaching 13GB of music and it's getting a little messy in there! Hope I've helped....

Wild Peach