Originally Posted By: hybrid8
And we can' forget the price of enclosures/controllers to be able to connect those drives.


This is exactly my problem. Not the disks themselves, although they're not free, but the enclosures. I have only a limited amount of space in my hall cupboard, so a massive tower case won't fit. I also want 2 backup copies of everything (one near-line, one off-line), which means buying 3x the disks.

At the moment, I have 5TB (1x2TB, 3x1TB) in external USB drives hanging out of the back of my Acer Revo R3610. I've got 3TB configured as on-line storage, and 2TB configured as on/near-line backup.

I've got ~250 DVDs, each of which will take ~6GB. That's ~1.5TB, before I even allow for extra DVDs (and the other stuff that lives on that volume). Without care, incremental backups could result in using twice that.

Quote:
What are you guys using to rip DVDs? DVD Shrink has been able to handle any disc I've used it with so far.


AnyDVD and CloneDVD (although DVD Shrink seems just as good). I'm stripping out the bits I don't need, but I've not looked at transcoding yet. DVDs are MPEG-2, right? Maybe I should transcode to MPEG-4 or similar?
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-- roger