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!
This morning I transcribed the contents of almost all the DVDs into a txt and put it online. If you want to see it, find the paste below:
https://paste.ofcode.org/i62L3dhMyLZut7VTW9LxPiDon’t delete anything until you find a replacement copy. A lot of media from that time period became lost with no known copies. You might be sitting on a treasure trove.
Yes absolutely, I hope this will be clear for all people in this subreddit
Get a cheap external USB DVD drive and a bigger HDD (4 TB is not enough, IMHO). Then simply go by your list and look what can be fetched from the net, you don’t have to copy those DVDs. Everything else grab from the discs. Afterwards put all the discs into a dark box and far away into storage. Maybe some day you still need it and with a small chance some of it will still be readable. :)
It honestly depends on what the data means to you. Is it the show itself, or the specific files that are important to you?
Getting a higher quality version means having a higher quality version to revisit, which is better in terms of preservation.
If thats too much effort, you could just pick up an external DVD drive and keep it with the DVDs. That would be basically zero effort and still let you access the discs whenever you want.