u/Forest-Crayola

So me and my mom were cleaning the house and found these old Seagate external hard drives that used to belong to my uncle. Apparently there used to be 8 of them, but now only 5 are left. Each one is 8TB, so it’s around 40TB total.

My uncle gave them to my dad years ago, and since my dad is away right now and we can’t contact him, my mom just gave them to me because I’m into movies and preserving physical media + I can probably use some for college and volunteering files. She didn’t actually know what was on them.

I was originally planning on using one or two of the drives for ripping and backing up my own DVDs and Blu-rays… but to my surprise, when I checked them, there were already things stored on all of them.
5,353 movies total. Each hard drive contained around 1,000 movies or so. Probably around 90% are Blu-ray rips and the rest are DVD rips/ISOs. Some even still have menus and extras intact and covers. There are movies from all kinds of eras too, including some dating back to the 1930s.

Honestly I was shocked. My own collection is only around 300 DVDs/Blu-rays, so suddenly finding 40TB worth of movies feels kind of insane, especially since I’m only 19.

Part of me wants to keep everything because it almost feels like a giant movie archive at this point. But another part of me wants to erase at least one drive so I can use it for my own collection and backups. I just feel bad deleting all those movies.

I was wondering:
- Is there any way to preserve something like this?
- Could something like Internet Archive work or - would that not be allowed?
- How do people store huge collections like this long term?
- Should I even keep all 40TB?

I’ve also thought about maybe selling some of the drives to help with college expenses because realistically I probably don’t need this much storage.

I just picked up a lot of DVDs and Blu-rays yesterday! The seller asked for $40, claiming it included about 40 DVDs and some Blu-rays. However, what I initially thought was 40 turned out to be over 80! This lot included my very first Criterion DVD, The Samurai Trilogy. I also found several movies I loved as a kid, along with more Barbie movies + some anime DVDs. Some items had missing pieces, but only a few, and there were even some games included. Unfortunately, I don’t have the devices to play them. Overall, I’m very happy with this find!