If you add a book to calibre an identical copy of the original book is made and copied into the library. The only thing that differs from the original file is the filename.
The main reason to archive the originals is if you do conversions and only want to keep one file format. For instance if you add a public domain mobi book, and convert it to epub and delete the mobi. Then there might perhaps be problems in the conversion that you don't discover at once, and it can save time and effort to have the original book on hand. I only have epub and pdf books. And convert as needed and delete all other formats.
It was quite a while ago since I had to get an archived original book back from archive, so perhaps it is a little too paranoid... I may start to just delete the originals once the book has been added to calibre and I have a verified backup of the calibre library.
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