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Comment by plusminusplus | Hacker News Reader

My understanding was there's a risk of disc degradation, is this a concern?

How do you "back up" a CD/DVD?

For Audio CDs you want to rip it lossless with something that support AccurateRip so you can be sure that others made the same copy byte-to-byte. Fortunately there are several options https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=AccurateRip#Soft...

For DVDs you can use the infamous DVD Decrypter to make ISO files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter

or MakeMKV which straight copies the MPEG2 files (.vob) into a nice MKV container https://www.makemkv.com/

DVDs are easy to backup. Lots of software out there, and there's nothing low level to worry about. Audio CDs also have lots of software out there, but you have to be a bit more picky if you're concerned about getting a bit for bit copy rather than just a sounds the same copy. If your discs have hidden tracks and all that kind of weird stuff, care is needed.

Once you have things onto your filesystem, the usual rules of backups apply.

>the usual rules of backups apply.

which would include keeping the original disc ripped to make this new copy that needs backing up. more than one copy. more than one format. more than one location.

For a CD, you need a program that uses libcdparanoia. Luckily, there are many.

DVDs contain a proper filesystem, so you can just mount and copy that.

Rip it to a hard drive or S3 bucket. Hard drive bonus is you can use Plex or Jellyfin to stream.

Handbrake makes it easy.

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