Quote:
Originally Posted by OtinG
BTW, DVDs will eventually degrade enough to be unusable. They tend to have a shelf life of around a decade, or so I've read. I have only had a few bite the dust, but sooner or later my still large library of old DVDs and Blu-ray discs will deteriorate and no longer be usable. That is kind of sad to think about. My computer CDs were really bad about deteriorating and I lost a lot of stored data from the 1990s. I think almost all of those old CDs stopped being usable years ago.
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The degradation typically only occurs with stuff YOU recorded, not the commercial DVDs (unless they are those compact ones with multiple movies on them). I've moved to getting all my favorites onto hard drives and backing up those hard drives. The real drive for that is that both my Mom and brother now have neurological problems with their hands and that they are afraid they will drop and break the disks. Now they play everything via Plex. Only the Disney movies (Beauty & the Beast, Lion King) are on DVD/BlueRay that I can't transfer to HD.
Family photos are probably the most important things to backup and keep putting on new media because they will be gone forever otherwise. Can't rely on clouds as they often have been discontinued without warning (or when you are in the middle of a family crisis and can't deal with it).