www.makemkv.com

During a recent move I lost my entire DVD & Blu-ray collection, built up over almost two decades. I am trying to slowly rebuild my library and this time I want to make sure I have back ups!

I’ve got a MacBook Air and just ordered a Pioneer BDR-XS07TUHD drive which I believe will work in LibreDrive Mode. I am planning to buy the first box sets a few at a time and use MakeMKV to initially only back up mirror copies to an external hard drive. Extracting these to unencrypted MPEG2 and transcoding would come at a later stage as it will take up much more time.

The question I have is this: As long as MakeMKV doesn’t throw up any errors during the initial back up process, would this mean that there were no faults with the discs at all? I won’t be able to watch everything to check at this stage, and if later there was a playback error, skipping or an episode couldn’t be played for some reason, I wouldn’t then be able to go back to the seller for an exchange anymore if the 30 day return period had already passed.

Simply put, could I be certain that everything will later transcode and play without any issues as long as there were no error messages during the initial copy process?

Thanks a lot for any confirmation you can give me!

Yes, MakeMKV makes it obvious if a copy does not work right.

Have you thought about the implications of storing a large amount of data on hard drives? Bit rot? Drive failures? Power outages? etc?

You're rightly concerned about things working when you come back around to trying to play and/or transcode your rips. A lot can happen to data sitting on a hard drive over time.

Thank you so much for confirming!

And yes, losing everything once has made me really think about how best to protect my library going forward. I will mirror the backups to a second drive and replace both of them every few years.

That way I will have the original discs, two backup drives as well as eventually all of the transcoded files on my devices.

Hopefully, that should do the trick!