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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Throw away all the DVDs or do I re-download everything? (alien.top)

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

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At home I have 2 boxes full of DVD-R Verbatims with TV series and Cartoons downloaded at the beginning of the 2000s. I'm talking about about 800 DVD-R 4.7GB. I would be willing to throw away all the DVDs because my old computer no longer has a working DVD player, so I wouldn't know how to read the contents. But I have 5-6 sheets of paper on which I have written what each DVD contains. My doubt is: Don't I waste time and re-download everything in 720p or 1080p format and buy like 4TB HDD or do I get an internal DVD player from the computer and copy all the old DVDs just so as not to waste the time lost at the beginning of the 2000s? Thanks all!

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

my old computer no longer has a working DVD player, so I wouldn't know how to read the contents.

Go onto Amazon and buy a new drive, they are dirt cheap. Heck you could get a usb-c one for future proofing.

Then you can either keep the discs or just copy everything off. Saves all that tedious faffing about with endless searching, downloading, indexing. Unless you enjoy that, which I don't, you'll get bored out of your skull and give it up for a while to play Hogwarts Legacy or something, then come back a year later to continue only to find the law got involved and killed the trackers you were relying on and you also have no idea where you got to anyway.

I'd just spend pocket money on a drive ;)