This week marks three full months since I started my project: Ripping all of my DVD’s to portable hard drives. I have close on 1000 movies and hundreds of hours of TV. I used WinXDVD to rip them all to MPEG4 files. Took Forever! The quality looks just fine to me on my TV’s. I even bought some new old series while I was ripping. I have been put of work for quite a while, so I have lots of free time. 
I figure another week or two take pictures and clean up the database and put the whole collection on Ebay.ca. should do well since lots of people are stuck hone with nothing to do. I was going to wait until later in the year where people watch more TV, but circumstances might be working for me.
I forgot how many movies I own and love. I have a lot of movies I haven’t watched in more than a decade. I started collecting 15 years ago and Really stopped watching them 11 or 12 years ago. I constantly browse through Netflix, Amazon and Shudder and can’t find anything to watch. Come August I will not renew Shudder or Amazon and might even quit Netflix.
I always thought it was so cool to have 6,500 songs ony phone/DAP in my pocket. Now my other pocket can hold about 3000 hours of TV/movies!
Gotta love the digital age. 
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Please looked into backing up your hard drive. That is a lot of work you won’t want to repeat.
I am ahead of you there. 
I bought two hard drives and I have moved all the data to two hard drives at a time.
I bought two different models of hard drive (4TB and 6TB) and I figure the chance of both going at the same time is literally one in a billion.
Also, on my next computer build, this year or next, I will go with a 4 to 5 TB hard drive and copy over to that.
I really had no idea what I needed, but it ended up being less than 3 terabytes. I am just putting the concerts in today and only have about a dozen DVD’s left to do.
Any tips on how to set this up on Ebay from anybody?
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If you use linux I’d recommend these software tools that may be of interest for you in increasing order of difficulty:
- rsync: Just use this to copy the drive from the start to the destination. When you rerun the command it will only synchronize the changes from source -> backup. The syncing is not bidirectional so you need to sync in both directions if you update both drives.
- lvm but only for moving and expanding as time goes by. Good for ghetto cloning.
- mdraid: software raid, being software raid and assuming you have your labels of the drives accurate, one of the more portable options of a raid.
- LizzardFS: Literally make a storage pool and it will synchronize like rsync above magically. Fun trick, with cjdns you can give your parents a computer to plugin and just “use”. If you have LizardFS set up you have a hands off offsite backup file server that works great with regionally separated storage syncing.
- Final backup: Backblaze, AWS Glacier, carbonite. Might be a bit much to sync up across the network but can come in clutch. It’s a paid service so tread lightly.
Wow! You really know your stuff. I am comfortable with just running the portable hard drives. One is a 6TB desktop model and requires a wall plug. This will hook into the TV via USB.
The smaller 4TB drive just slides right into your pocket. No power cable required as it just draws power through the USB cable. It will either be plugged into the bedroom TV or just thrown in a drawer.
When I get the new computer, I will copy over to the hard drive. Two to three copies is lots of back up for me.