Downloading your games once is not necessarily that hard. Sure it is lots of clicking and waiting, but a trained monkey could do that.

Keeping the installers up to date (tracking which have received updates, and downloading those) is. Fortunately 3rd party tools like gogrepo.py make that rather simple too. Hopefully it keeps working.

There are other star systems, there is no other way to get your games if GOG servers shut down.
It's quite clear which of those imagined scenarios is more serious.

If you're talking about the steam games that require steam then you back them up the same was you do with any DRM ridden game.

Sad to see another legit store going down, while G2A and other thievery dens keep growing.

I'm wondering if it's even worth keeping my DotEmu SEGA games, since the "illegal" emulated versions seem to work better (no input lag, Game Genie options, etc.). Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Steam SEGA games have all the ROMs that you can feed to any other emulators.
I guess the dotemu version do the same?

At least you should keep some kind of proof of purchase, because that way downloading those games from "alternative sources" may not necessarily be illegal, as you still have the licence to use them.

I personally have done that a couple of times, not with DotEmu, but otherwise. I think for instance my Gilbert Goodmate CD-ROM was so buggy that I couldn't even finish the game, but because I own that copy, downloading a working w4r3z version is not really piracy, but just comparable to a fan patch or something.
The local laws in different places may or may not support this view.

Cheers for the answers. Since it's only about 700 megs, I may go ahead and backup the DotEmu files just so I can say I have them. Nevertheless, versions from "other" sources seem better.

Just backed up mine, 6GB.
Afaik this store has the only drm-free version of the magnifiscent Commandos Strike Force to date.
I got this on Beamdog. Legend sez you can gift others and all through their client once you own the game; never tried it.

Every now and then older games may get some fixes too, e.g. that they work better with newer OSes (or at all), or the game music has been fixed, and so on. E.g. Haegemonia Gold didn't work at all in Windows 8 or 10 earlier, but at some point GOG fixed that. Or Little Big Adventure had low quality soundtrack which was fixed at some point.

I certainly like to have the fixed versions of these games while I can.

they are the same indeed I have them both, the only real diference is the DRM.
anyway, this is true?, can you use these roms to play them on another emulator?...
:O

Steam version put almost all ROMS in the directory: uncompressed ROMs.
You can use any emulators to play them.
The simple launcher in Steam version is DRM-free and wine-compatible.

Keep them both. Keep the DotEmu version to prove you purchased the right to play them. Keep the "illegal" versions of superior quality to play them. Thanks for the warning. Since DotEmu was DRM-free one can at least easily backup. However, it's a bit sad to see a DRM-free competitor of GOG go. DotEmu always had some games, GOG had not. Maybe GOG can take over the publishing rights of those games that DotEmu has but GOG hasn't for a small fee. That would probably in the best interest of everyone involved.

Now I have everything I have on DotEmu redownloaded. 46.9GB. The speed varied, sometimes (last Sunday morning) I got pretty poor download speeds, but now I got over 3 Mbytes/s, at least when i downloaded several files at the same time. When downloading one file at a time, it seemed to come at best at 1.7 Mbytes/s or so.

I had the games backed up already two years ago, but just checking if anything has been updated in the meantime (I don't think so). At some point the installer files for e.g. Silverfall: Earth Awakening had changed, but I have no idea if only the installer had been updated, or had the game itself been updated as well. But that was already several years ago. Since I don't know what had changed, I've kept also the older Silverfall: EA installer files on my hard drive, just in case...

Goodbye DotEmu, I guess I won't be visiting you anymore after this. I so much hope I had bought all the Sudden Strike games from your store when I still had the chance... :( Hopefully they appear to GOG at some point.