Best way to hold on to your movies/tv shows?

[Xanthe]

Recently I thought to myself, "I want to be able to have a collection of my favorite TV shows and show them to my kids in the future"

What might be the best way to go about this? I though about burning my favorite TV shows to DVDs, but the 1080p quality won't be there without a special blu-ray burner. Too expensive.

I thought about using hard-drives, but I don't trust that USB will be a huge thing in the future. I also don't think that hard drives last very long before they shit out.

Any recommendations to preserve my favorite shows?

 

[RHOPKINS13]

I think you're pretty safe with a USB 3.0 external drive. Even if they're not a "huge thing" in the future (and I doubt that "USB 4.0" won't be backwards compatible), you could always buy a USB Expansion Card. To this day you can still buy an external floppy drive, I don't think you'd have anything to worry about.

Your best bet would be to get an external USB RAID 1 Enclosure with 2 hard drives, so that if one dies you still have all your movies. And if for whatever reason you end up with a computer without USB ports, you can take the drives out and install them inside the computer via SATA. But if the idea of burning blu-rays is too expensive for you, I doubt you're going to want to pay for that.

I really doubt what you're trying to do is even necessary. Look at all the old television shows available on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Google Play, Crackle, Xbox Live, .... etc. Chances are whatever your favorite tv shows are will still be available in the future. Or perhaps they'll be available on a torrent, or maybe even just Archive.org. There are piracy sites dedicated to archiving this type of stuff. So if you're not willing to pay for a good archival system, perhaps your best bet is to just keep a list of your favorite tv shows. Because I can almost guarantee you they will be accessible somewhere online in the future, unless you're watching something really obscure that hardly anybody else like and therefore there's no demand for it.

 

[DinohScene]

I've got them stored on me server where they will reside probably until the day I die.

I can't really trust the Internet to hold onto them forever.
Especially when it comes to short lived series and specials.