But most were aimed at large corporations or service providers, and very rarely at home users. Over the years, many commercial systems have sported multiple DVD drives, sometimes with hoppers or robot arms to feed in the discs. Buying specialised hardware would be expensive while doing it manually could take a long time. Moving it to a hard drive makes sense, but there’s no obvious way to do it. Technically, your data is accessible, but the sheer volume of DVDs means it’s not very practical. I didn’t think to mention storage, or the effort it might take to retrieve it. Schofield’s First Law of Computing says: Never put data into a program unless you can see exactly how to get it out. Robots do exist for automating copying optical discs to drives, but they’re not exactly cheap. Today’s 8TB and larger drives confirm that we were right. They were getting bigger and cheaper at a rapid pace. However, by the time Blu-ray writers became affordable, we already knew that external hard drives were going to win the storage wars. In theory, we might have switched from DVD to the new Blu-ray discs instead, because a Blu-ray can store either 25GB (single-layer) or 50GB (dual-layer) on archival discs. A decade later, an Amazon receipt tells me I bought a 500GB Western Digital My Book for £62.20, so I was probably switching from optical to digital disks some time around 2008, if not before. We didn’t get DVD+RW discs storing 4.7GB each until about 1998, when 4GB was a reasonable size for a hard drive. The CD-R recordable format, storing 702MB, was launched in 1982, when my IBM PC/XT’s hard drive stored 10MB. Just cutting one disc a week could get you over the 1,000 mark, though I assume most of them would have been recopied and recycled before now. I expect many of us still have lots of optical discs stashed away, because CDs and DVDs were the most economical way to store data for 20 to 30 years. Is there a DVD recorder that can load 10 to 20 DVDs at a time and automatically copy them onto said 10TB hard drive? Also, are there any issues with the formats needed to ensure access to my data for another 10 years or more? Harry
Can you and your erudite readers recommend the quickest solution?
Now I want to transfer their contents onto a single 10TB USB hard drive. Over the years, I have been backing up files to writeable DVDs.
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