I also burned disks of downloads at first, thinking of them as the long term backup for the files I was playing.  But as my collection of ripped and downloaded files grew I moved toward a fully digital way of thinking and began backing up all my music to portable hard drives and lately multiple copies at more than one location of 1 TB micro sd cards.  One advantage of this arrangement is I can instantly dial up any record I own on multiple devices and also instantly bring up photos of the album covers and booklets.  This is particularly helpful in my case because visual disabilities make it near impossible for me to read most cd covers and booklets but I can read the photos when I blow them up on a good sized monitor.

I don't like downloads, but am certainly not going back to vinyl, so have started buying them for items where CD's are either not available or priced in the stratosphere.  But I'm so physical product-collector oriented that I actually burn the downloads to CD-R, print off copies of the front and back covers, stick them in a thinline jewel case, and store them on my shelves along with my CD's.