this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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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a binder with the cover art stored in folders, but it seems like a gigantic waste of money to buy a storage system for outdated standard definition media, when most studios have remastered editions readily available.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 gave away most of my DVDs to a couple who live on a mountain with no internets, I gave away most of my CDs to a music hoarder.

I found myself in a loop where I'd rip all of my physical media, then rarely consume any of it, then some new format would come out, I'd get larger drives and re-rip everything, and rarely consume it. I had to break the cycle.