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.
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...
I’ve gone so far that I’m scanning my books. Almost done. DVD’s have been gone for years.
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.
My shelves are full of anime figurines. I don't have space to store DVDs.
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.
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)
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'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.
I didn't 'throw out' my DVD collection, but I did get rid of over 90% of it. Back when Hastings was still in business, I took all of it to them for a 'buy back' (knowing I'd only get pennies on my dollar). I only kept the physical media of things I re-watch often (and have re-watched since I got rid of the rest of the titles).
I went from two cheap multi-shelf Walmart DVD shelves down to a single shelf. Everything else is stored on my Plex server (which is also my NAS), which itself is just a PC with a built in 8-bay 3.5" hotswap cage. :)
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 don't throw out anything. I keep physical and digital media. Of course, I have a lot of rooms to store it.
Me i still buy VHS/DVD/Bluray. Some movies on vhs i have never got dvd or bluray releases. Others like the first Mortal Kombat, has different french dub (different voice actors and dialogue) and different background music on both dvd and bluray compared to vhs. The movie The Mask, on vhs as i recall has some scenes which are a few seconds longer and one small scene at the start absent from the dvd and bluray releases. Bluray doesn't have the french dub. So for some movies i have both vhs/dvd or vhs/bluray depending on the dub (if french dub is absent or altered).
For games i thrift a lot so i still massively purchase cd-roms & dvd-roms for pc. Since 2017 i bought like two hundred pc games. I automatically archive the discs and then proceed to use them to play.
I of course buy physical for consoles too and my video game shop of choice has 10 games for 30$CAD; systems included are PS2/PS3/PS4/XBOX/XBOX360/XBOX ONE. More common games and those which they have too many copies are part of the bargain. I got the dead space trilogy and crysis trilogy for xbox 360 that way. I buy games for all consoles except gb/gbc since buying high quality carts and flashing them is cheaper than the originals and you get FRAM instead of SRAM for your saves which makes them last up to 40 years. I don't buy nes/snes/genesis games anymore but once i acquire soldering skills i will buy again and change the SRAM chips for FRAM to have durable saves.
I am defo considering selling my DVDs and probably blurays after ripping them. I can play them on the PS4 but since I'm putting everything on Plex now, playing physical is just extra steps.
Buy > rip > give to me
all of it. about 15 years ago when i started collecting digitally. never looked back.
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.
Do you have a system of backups for your digital library? For example at minimum do you have a physical backup of the data on drives not connected to your main computer AND an offsite backup (cloud storage or storing backed up physical media offsite)?
If not then you’re risking losing your entire library to one power spike caused by a nearby lightning strike or any other number of random events such as malfunctioning drives… etc.