Data Hoarder

Havent had optical media since 2012, spare a few CD's I bought to support artists I like, which I can't listen too because no optical drive.

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Yeah if you are not a collector who wants to display their collection it makes no sense to hold on to the physical media. As long as you have digital backups (3-2-1).

Used to be the case in some countries that physical media is proof you have purchased legally. Even if you just keep the disks on a spindle (aka the spindles from writable media packs). This is how i keep my original media in the back of the cupboard.

If they have cases I pay .50 on blu ray and .15 on dvd. The binder discs are pretty much garbage but .05 a piece seems reasonable. Prices are in CAD. No one has room for clutter it seems. Good thing I have a warehouse.

Box up the media and store it away if you got space. There’s are prob more worthless stuff in a box somewhere than media. Do whatever let you sleep better at night.

I live in a small apartment (40 m², about 430 sqft), and I still like to buy physical media (although that doesn't mean everything I own has to be on physical media).

For me it's mostly music (~700 CDs, ~500 LPs), and a handful of DVDs/BluRays. I guess I just like to have that stuff around me. If Amazon/Netflix/Spotify/Deezer/whatever other streaming services there are all shut down tomorrow I don't even care...

Implying there was physical media to begin with. yarrrr lol but for real im debating it. I have 4 boxes of dvd's in the closet I havent touched since 2 house moves ago and I dont even have an optical drive in house at the moment (this moment has been since 2020 when I pulled a bluray drive out of my tower to make room for a 8x 2.5 drive dock for another raid)

My shelves are full of anime figurines. I don't have space to store DVDs.

I've started throwing out DVD cases, but keeping the disks in a DVD binder like you. Still keeping the Blu-ray cases on the shelves for now.

Don't buy books/video/music on physical media unless it's hard/impossible to get a digital version. But also don't rely on IP subscription services either. The Cloud is great as part of a backup strategy: but not as an exclusive service that could gate your access to your content.

Digital storage is great because it can hold anything: books, shows, games, whatever. And it can be easily copied, and sent around the world. Have some space you own: redundant and automatically backed-up to a Cloud service... then enjoy it for years. It will feed your ebook readers and media players and homelab devices for a long time, and take up almost no space.

I still keep my hundreds of books and thousands of vinyl records even though I consume almost everything electronically. There’s something to be said for not having your entire culture locked up in small grey anonymous boxes.

I never really like rewatching stuff so I never really had a collection, sold all my cds for pennies a decade ago.

i'm moved from video (dvd/blu/4kblu) to vinyl as my financial disaster hobby

will be selling off my large collection of movies early in the new year, including a large criterion collection mostly unopened

I moved back in April to a much smaller place. I am having a hard time parting with over 2500 Blurays and 4k's. On top of that thousands more of "collector" Steelbooks and custom sets from places like Nova, FilmArena, HDZeta, Manta Lab etc.

I used to have a spare bedroom dedicated to movie stuff with all my media on Billy Bookshelves and special editions and movie parapharnelia shelved and on display. Now it's all in boxes.
I have it all ripped 1:1 on my Media server plus backups but can't get myself to rid of the physical media.

I keep my physical discs. I do however throw out the cases and put the discs themselves into a 400 disc binder. They take up a lot less space and then I can bring them with if I go someplace without Internet or pull them out if my Plex server crashes and I can't be bothered to fix it.

My physical discs are my ultimate "backup", also proof of purchase if for some reason in the future sharing my server with a FEW friends and family becomes problematic. I had the same issue with storage and at first went with binders and keeping the cover art but am now at the point of just buying disc spindles and throwing any new discs onto them as even the binders are too bulky for me (I have 4 200 disc binders currently which contains about 500 movie/TV series discs and about 300 CDs.)

Never throw away physical media. If space is a problem, remove disks from cases and store on spindles (the packages that CD-R blanks come in are ideal).

Most people run a compression pass on media rips (handbrake) to make storage feasible with today's disks and budgets. The day is rapidly approaching when hard disks will be large enough and cheap enough to store bit exact copies of your media. You'll want to rerip then, and having the media will make that possible.

Physical media serves as long term stable backup. It should be part of your backup plan, just like multiple physical backup disks sets, offsite storage, cloud storage, etc.

If space is an issue, there are easy solutions. Disks do not have to be in cases, and they're too useful to part with.

I donated all of my physical copies of things once I had a good system of doing it all digitally. It was one thing when the physical copies were what I used to enjoy the content, but when I realized I was regularly going to the digital copies of things I had physically, all of the shelves full of DVDs, albums, CDs, and books started feeling like little more than weird little trophy cases. In that context, the amount of space I devoted to them seemed silly.

I have two boxes of burned CDRs, that I've replaced with better rips. Remember DiVX? Fit a 90 minute movie on a 700MB disc with obvious artifacting even at SD resolutions. Still can't bring myself to get rid of them.

Checked a few of them a couple years ago and they all still worked. Taiyo Yuden made good stuff.

I never understood people that say physical media takes too much space. It's literally a binder or two.

Chuck the boxes, keep the sleeves.

buy a couple of cheap plastic totes after christmas to put all the physical media in and store it. you will never get much selling physical media (with the exception of a few titles). and rebuilding the collection years from now will not be easy or cheap (since most of yours will be oop in 10-20 years)

Buy > rip > give to me

Yeah managed to sell all my dvds and blurays to a collector trying to line his basement media room with them.

all of it. about 15 years ago when i started collecting digitally. never looked back.

Remux 4K on the NAS. Discs only if I can't find what I'm looking for with other means. Then rip and shelve until someone I know wants them.

Reminds me of back in the day when cd's went to mp3. I had spindles of retail cd's that I couldn't fit into binders. Ripped everything to flac and gave away the cd's.

Everything is digital/streaming now.

I would never do this, personally. But it depends on the collection - mine consists almost entirely of 3D movies... most are out of print and many are now quite rare. If it's a bunch of easy-to-find titles then that's a different story

I backed all mine up and sold it. I can't justify dedicating a whole room in my house to media when I can fit it all on a few hard drives.

I'm in the process of throwing everything away. I have got a digital copy(s) of all my content and even remasters of DVD media. I don't even have a DVD player.

I tried selling it on market place and it's not getting any offers. Time for the bin.

I assume hard drives are not considered "physical" for some reason?

I tossed vinyl, VHS, cassettes, 8mm, miniDV, CDs, and DVDs. I also tossed all photos negatives and prints.

I purged hundreds of DVDs when I moved, movies and series I was confident I'd never rewatch, or that would be easy to find on Blu-Ray.

I still occasionally buy used DVDs, mainly foreign films and series, and mountain bike or fmx videos.

I need to do the same with my CDs. And make backups of the rare ones in case of disc rot. Vinyl likewise; but those won't be given away.

I got rid of all my books. Never really had dvd/bluray.

Unlikely to get rid of photos as Id have to digitize all the old stuff and physical copies are a pretty good backup…

Buy > Rip > Donate to thrift store. This way I can make someone else happy.

I did throw out boxes and put them all in a folder. Saved tons of space. Simply could not keep them all like they were

Hard drives fail in a few years. Factory printed dvd blue rays and burned M disc dont fail, right? So, you just by new and larger hard drives every 10 years?

Thrown out? I don't understand. What does that mean?

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.

I’ve been getting rid of my physical media too. I still have my UHD movies but I don’t even watch them…

Yeah like 10 years ago

Still got some but I only have a couple dozen.

I quit buying physical media many years ago.

Just not any point, It's never more convenient to carry around a physical book to read when I already have a tablet that has hundreds.

I'm never going to want to have to physically find and insert a dvd or bluray just to sit through previews and warnings that I'm only subject to because I dared pay $20 for a physical disc.

Plus they're impractical for the same reasons as physical books.

I can watch pretty much any movie on my phone now from practically anywhere.

The only thing I think you might regret and realistically this is only a concern for older releases as this is pretty much completely not a thing anymore is the disc bonus features. Most modern stuff just flat doesn't have anything extra but used to you could get director's commentary and deleted scenes and stuff on the disc, things that online releases don't often include.

MY GF has the same problem. Huge physical media collection, tiny living space. She was on the verge of throwing it out/ donating it after I set up an Emby server for her, but managed to reach a compromise instead. Disc binders.

While still taking up space, they are much smaller than normal DVD cases and you still have them for backup.

Only beta and VHS tapes, except for those that were never released on anything else.

I dumped all my CD-Rs and DVD-Rs ages ago as we don’t have a physical player any more, not including game consoles.

I just throw out the cases. Buy used, rip, store disk in a collection case.

Kept the discs, tossed the cases. You can fit a lot of discs in a sleeve book and they make convenient backups.

I figure my DVDs and CDs don't take much room. I have a few Case-Logic binders that hold about 400 discs each. They're about the size of a medium-sized 3-ring binder.

I’ve gone so far that I’m scanning my books. Almost done. DVD’s have been gone for years.

Personally I keep all my stuff. If the file gets lost or damaged I don't need another copy, I can just grab mine and rescan it. Plus DVDs play in almost all of my machines (I installed a DVD drive in most of them) so there's that.

Surprised Ctrl-F turned up zero occurrences of "copyright". It is legal to back up CDs (which have no copy protection that would fall under DMCA), provided one keeps the originals. And I haven't heard of an individual getting prosecuted for backing up copy-protected discs like DVDs.

I keep my originals, for legal reasons. I wish I didn't have to keep the atoms around, but I feel like I do.