Even if you buy it online, you can still have a physical backup of everything. Archive copies of your game via impulse after you've downloaded. Those archived files have a funny extension, but they really are just zip archives so you can extract everything and put them on a disk or not extract them and still put them on a disk. In the future, say after a hard drive meltdown or something, just copy the disk back to your new hard drive and reinstall, no new downloading required.