As long as they are the right region format for the DVD player they should be fine. Ripped files don’t really have region formats anymore, but you can add the appropriate one in most burners.

You can also get region agnostic players but that’s probably harder to do now than just making all your media in the right format.

External HDs are good for short term backup - I do use them for that myself.

But they are not suitable for long term backup, they are susceptible to damage, sector errors,bit rod and interference.

If you leave them unpowered for longer times the chances that the mechanical components are gonna fail are actually increased.

Some of these issues can be reduced,but never fully.

Additionally there are ransomware viruses that directly attack them - they intentionally encrypt the backups first when the drives are connected before they attack the live data. And in at least one case I know of the attackers bricked the HD firmware.

Therefore for long term storage of really important things WORM (write once read many) media is to be preferred - even if the attackers can access the disk for some reason they cannot alter the once written data.

Personally I store all “Very important data” on it - things I really don’t want to loose even if my data storage at home and my cloud storage gets compromised. Among them:

• Photos of life events. Wedding, photos of the kids, photos of relatives that are now deceased, etc.

• Important documents. Birth certificates, copies of IDs, passports, insurance documents, degrees and certificates, banking/taxation/accounting documents, bills for the important stuff like major renovations, the expensive IT stuff, etc.*

• Backup of important files (for me Uni files for my lectures, some work files, backup of the password DBs, plans for the house, a tutorial how to receive files from the cloud storage, decryption keys, etc.)

(*: This is more a theoretical choice - as I can get 100GB media for the same price as the 50GB I currently simply copy the full paperless file storage. But the script normally only copies these. They are flagged with a custom field in paperless)

I do not use addition to the storage,so no “these files are new since the last copy” but I simply make a full backup of these files every time (usually three times a year). This reduces the risk of one backup being compromised - very likely I only fall back 4 month which is tolerable. The discs itself are stored in a locked box in a bank vault a bit further away. I have to go there a few times a year anyway,so it’s not hassle. (And they have great coffee). The box costs me 50€ a year and has enough room for 50 years of M Disks and a few extra items.

Anything taxation related must be stored for 10 years even by private individuals here,so there is that.

My customers (smaller health care organisations, e.g. your fellow neighbourhood dentist or GP) usually store patient data and accounting data on them. They need to store them long term (up to 30 years) for legal reasons, additionally they don’t want a opposing lawyer to later tell them “you have manipulated the data”. Having multiple copies that cannot be manipulated reduces that claim to “you manipulated before you stored it” and we have other ways to fight that.

SDs are cheap these days, 128 class 10 for 9$. Just don’t buy them for OS level writes, logging is ok.

We regularly look at photographs taken at the dawn of photography, and read documents created hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

There is a use case for this tech.

The fuck are you backing up that you have 20tb of?

Nothing stops people from mix matching backup media.

If I lose the series I downloaded versus my family photos, not the same impact.

Not sure where you’re from, but that website link is Australian and $150 AUD is about $94 USD at the moment.

If the burner is cheap enough, or you can borrow one, backing up family photos in a way that will be viewable in hundreds of years time would be worth it to me.