Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Has anybody here thrown out their physical media? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Since the pandemic I’ve been collecting DVDs and Blu-rays, because I started getting into filmmaking and valued the importance of physical media. One of my reasons was the horror stories I’ve read about licenses on DRM-protected purchases being revoked.

After we moved to a much smaller house, my Billy bookshelf containing around 200+ titles has been taking a huge amount of space. And the cases just sit there looking pretty. We never use the discs. There’s no Blu-ray player in our house. We all watch digital content on portable devices. I’ve filled up several hard drives with so many obscure, international films that will never get distribution here. And so, I’ve stopped buying discs. It’s also much more convenient to be able to play MKVs on every device in my house.

I was one of those people who constantly purchased discs to remux and encode them myself for use on a future server, but that’s a waste of time, energy and money as there are dozens of release groups who’ve done the work already for me.

It doesn’t make sense to keep all the clutter around. I also have 500+ DVDs in a binder with the cover art stored in folders, but it seems like a gigantic waste of money to buy a storage system for outdated standard definition media, when most studios have remastered editions readily available.

I’m thinking of selling the Blu-rays that aren’t rare to buy a cheapo Optiplex. The discs are already pretty worthless. I’m just scared that I might regret this decision.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I’ve got a similar situation. In an apartment with limited storage and just want to eliminate the storage I have. My main suggestion - double backup everything you want to keep. I’ve already lost one backup early on but luckily had a backup to that.

Regret will happen - it did when I got rid of some CDs. But the relief of having the extra free space more than makes up for that.

The 80’s 12” singles I have are all transferred to digital with multiple backups. I have an 80’s music show ready for syndication so I can’t lose that (I kept the 600 or so 12” singles).

But then there’s the 350 “blank” VHS tapes loaded with network TV shows from the mid-80’s to the mid-00’s. They’re bulky, heavy & take up 6 big storage bins - so they need to go. Many have never aired beyond the original airing, never been released in any format (including streaming) and most can’t even be found on YouTube. It’s not lost media, it’s more like next-to-impossible to find currently unreleased media. I’ve spent time over the last few months transferring my favorites to digital. That will be double backed up. Fun times lol.