How To Upload Vcd To External Hard Drive
Over the years, I accept been bankroll upwardly files to writeable DVDs. I probably accept around 1,400 of them. Now I want to transfer their contents onto a single 10TB USB hard drive. Can you lot and your erudite readers recommend the quickest solution?
Is there a DVD recorder that tin can load x to 20 DVDs at a time and automatically copy them onto said 10TB hard drive? As well, are there any bug with the formats needed to ensure access to my data for some other 10 years or more? Harry
I expect many of united states however have lots of optical discs stashed away, considering CDs and DVDs were the most economical way to store data for twenty to 30 years. Just cutting one disc a calendar week could get yous over the ane,000 mark, though I assume most of them would have been recopied and recycled before now.
The CD-R recordable format, storing 702MB, was launched in 1982, when my IBM PC/XT'south hard drive stored 10MB. We didn't go DVD+RW discs storing 4.7GB each until virtually 1998, when 4GB was a reasonable size for a hard drive. A decade later, an Amazon receipt tells me I bought a 500GB Western Digital My Volume for £62.20, and then I was probably switching from optical to digital disks some time effectually 2008, if non before.
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. However, by the fourth dimension Blu-ray writers became affordable, we already knew that external hard drives were going to win the storage wars. They were getting bigger and cheaper at a rapid pace. Today's 8TB and larger drives confirm that we were right.
Money or time?
Schofield'south First Law of Computing says: Never put data into a program unless you tin see exactly how to get information technology out. I didn't think to mention storage, or the effort it might take to retrieve it. Technically, your data is accessible, but the sheer volume of DVDs means it's not very practical. Moving it to a hard bulldoze makes sense, but there'south no obvious way to practise information technology. Buying specialised hardware would exist expensive while doing it manually could take a long fourth dimension.
Over the years, many commercial systems accept sported multiple DVD drives, sometimes with hoppers or robot artillery to feed in the discs. But nigh were aimed at big corporations or service providers, and very rarely at domicile users.
Multi-DVD systems usually targeted either the disc duplication or data sharing markets. Products aimed at the showtime enabled companies to create lots of identical DVDs at once. Products aimed at the second were file servers, somewhat like giant jukeboxes. They enabled companies to share data from big numbers of DVDs or BDs, or create "cold storage" backups that could last for 50 years. Facebook, for example, adult a server to store 10,000 Blu-ray discs, and demonstrated the system in a three-minute YouTube video.
MF Digital's Ripstation 7000 Series CD/DVD/BD ripper should practice what you want, merely it costs $4,595, including the born PC. It uses a robot arm to pick up discs and drib them into a DVD tray. Products like this are aimed at radio and TV stations, publishing empires and educational institutions that needed – perchance nevertheless need – to convert a lot of old discs into digital format. They are not expensive compared with the cost of humans doing it manually.
I'm not certain if MF Digital's cheaper Music CD Ripping Station would do the job because you don't need to rip your discs, only copy them to a hard bulldoze. All the same, I suspect £i,699.56 is more than than you want to pay for a one-off job.
That leaves you with one fast choice: find a company that owns a Ripstation 7000 or similar device and offers file transfer as a service. I didn't manage to find one – the search terms are tricky – and the price might even so be prohibitive. I'd guess information technology would price from 25p to £1 per deejay, and 50p doesn't sound too unreasonable. Even with a majority bargain, moving your information might cost £500. You'd as well face up the problem of shipping a very big box of discs at to the lowest degree one way.
If anyone knows of an affordable DVD-to-HDD copying service, please let u.s. know in the comments, or email me at the address below.
Transmission copying
If there'due south no quick ready that y'all tin justify on price, you will have to re-create every DVD by hand. You could tackle it every bit a vacation project, simply information technology'due south a tedious style to spend your gratuitous time. Alternatively, fix yourself a target, such every bit copying five to 10 discs per day, every 24-hour interval. Fifty-fifty with some breaks, you should get it done in a yr. If you lot don't set a target, you might never end the task.
Maybe y'all could speed up the process by using two DVD drives, only it depends on the hardware you lot accept available. A PC tower could take two internal DVD drives, but you would probably have to purchase and install them.
Alternatively, you could buy one or ii external DVD drives and plug them into USB ports, or into a powered USB hub. (Not every USB port provides enough power to run a DVD that doesn't accept its own power supply.) With two drives, you can load a DVD in i drive while the other drive is copying files.
After that, information technology would be a boon to have some software to notice discs and copy the files automatically. This avoids waiting for the file directory to announced, highlighting the files you want, and dragging them to your hard bulldoze.
Perfect Automation has a utility that does the job well. You bank check the box for "Copy a lot of CD/DVDs automatically" and start feeding it discs. It copies each one to a new folder that it creates on your hard drive (CDDVD1, CDDVD2 etc), so pops out the DVD tray for the next disc. It'due south a small (219K), free program and doesn't demand to be installed, so information technology's worth a try.
I also tried Averk's gratuitous AutoCopy ii, which is fifty-fifty smaller at 184KB. Averk had much the same problem as you – he wanted to motion more than than 100 CDs to a difficult drive – and wrote a piffling utility to do it. Different Perfect Automation's program, AutoCopy 2 includes a countdown timer. While its copying took longer than Perfect Automation on my system, I found that both were faster and more than reliable than doing information technology manually.
Format issues
The first task is to copy all the DVDs to a difficult bulldoze and, patently, to a backup difficult drive: y'all don't want to do this job twice. You can worry nearly file formats later.
Over the long term, the best choices are normally the about common formats, especially if they are ratified international standards. Given the cost of storage present, it'due south not worth converting files to more efficient, space-saving formats, because this takes time and may involve some loss of quality. I'thou leaving my jpg and png images, mp3 music, avi videos and other files in their original formats.
I'm converting some videos that were in less popular formats – such as wmv, mov, flv and rm – to mp4 with the H.264 codec, which is supported by processors (Intel Quick Sync Video) and virtually graphics cards. Programs such equally Wonderfox'southward Hd Video Converter Factory brand this very easy to do. You tin also reprocess old videos to remove colour casts, brand them expect sharper, correct faulty aspect ratios and "upscale" their resolution, though the results from my erstwhile VHS-C video camera volition never await skilful by today's standards.
Even DVD-quality movies are rarely worth the endeavor, unless they are of holidays, weddings, or your kids' birthday parties. DVDs have a resolution of 720 ten 480 pixels (American NTSC) or 720 x 540 (United kingdom PAL). Today, we live in a 1080p earth (1920 x 1080 pixels) on the mode to 4K (3840 x 2160). You tin probably watch the same videos in much higher quality on Netflix, Amazon Prime, BritBox, YouTube or some other streaming service.
Take you got a question? E-mail it to Ask.Jack@theguardian.com
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2020/feb/06/how-can-i-copy-1400-dvds-to-a-new-hard-drive
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