Should I back up my home DVD's to an external hard drive?

[Trever34]

I have 135 home movie DVD's (not all are full) and would like to put them onto one external hard drive
for back up and ease of use. I'm using an Imac computer. I realize this would be very time consuming which I'm ok with. My thought is I could plug the hard drive and with each movie I could write a description of whats on the dvd and this would be easy to choose and shuffle from one film to another. I'm hoping to just plug the hard drive into the tv when I want to show these movies.
Any thoughts on this project?

 

[kanewolf]

Backups are always good. Can't have too many. If this is truly irreplaceable home movies, you might want to do a cloud backup in case your home is ever burned, or flooded, or burglarized.

 

[americanaudiophile]

Since these are home movies they will not have any copyguard on them so ripping them will not be difficult or illegal.
Make sure that when you rip the DVDs that the file type is compatible with the your TV. The HD will need to be the right format for your TV and iMac.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the community, Trever!

Indeed, the more backups you have, the safer you will feel about your data and storage. However, make sure that the external drive's file system is properly configured. Since you are using a Mac OS X computer and you want to play the movies on your TV, you might be required to reformat the external (Which is how you will change the file system). Make sure you don't have any important data on the HDD when you do this, the process will erase all the files you currently store there.

You should also check the TV manual about the file system that it reads.

Keep us posted if you have more questions! Good luck!
SuperSoph_WD