We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
I spent my covid years backing up all my dvds and blurays. Most, especially for TV, I dropped them. But for movies I kept as many as I could.
Some people will have gone for iso backups so they're implicitly captured but I just did remuxes as separate files so they're easier to use and play.
Is anyone archiving special features?
Yes I backup all in separate mkv files, it's really long to rename each features, I'm not sure I will watch them one day but it happens time to time that I watch these.
I feel the same way. I'm afraid of losing the special features on the DVDs. I've ripped all my series box sets into .mkvs.
The nice thing is that there is a plugin for Kodi called "Extras". You can then create a separate folder for the bonus features in the series or film folder. If you now select a film in Kodi, you can also select the extras directly.
I keep all special features except regular trailers. I say regular trailers because some may contain scenes or outakes that are only available there.
I've also found that sometimes the extras on Blu-Ray releases are different. At least on the Asian releases I hoard.
I just keep the DVDs and Blu-ray as they are considering I use optical media for archives anyway!
But let's say I have a dvd that needs backup because it's extremely rare or, and this is actually more likely and what I actually do: I'm off on holiday at the end of the week and want to have Red Dwarf series 1 and I don't fancy bringing the dvd itself along because I'm short on space when packing.
Well, rip the disc to an ISO file or as a mirrored directory structure. It's only a maximum of 8GB for a single disc. I just rip a mirror of the disc using vobcopy.
Vobcopy will rip a title, or a chapter or will recreate the exact copy of the disc as a mirror, all the VOB files, IFO files etc. That way you have everything, all extras and all menus. It is a mirror of the disc, no re-encoding.
If having a 8GB iso is not what you are after and you need to re-encode, well that will need you to rip each disc specially, that means to learn how the extras are laid out, what audio tracks are what etc. You can rip it all to separate files, but you will lose things like menus and other presentation elements which is why I just mirror the whole disc.
As I keep all my discs and use them as intended I don't need to worry about ripping extras if I don't need to. In my example I mirrored Red Dwarf S1 but that was just so I could avoid taking the disc on holiday (I was already taking other discs and had no room) and I didn't care to re-encode. I also simply deleted that rip when I was done with it as, well it's still on dvd.
But I do have some rips of DVDs I no longer have. I may have upgraded to the Blu-ray and wanted to rip the main title for eas of use when on holiday etc, or I simply didn't care enough to keep the dvd of something but I couldn't just not have a copy of that thing I didn't care much about. Thus I have ripped certain DVDs that I don't intend to keep, only the main titles and no extras. I only rip what I can't be bothered much about so I really can't see the point in ripping the extras for something that is just above the "delete" key lol.