I’ve gone so far that I’m scanning my books. Almost done. DVD’s have been gone for years.

Just went through this but with books.

If you look on Amazon there’s a company called CZUR that makes scanners which are a camera on a stick with a foot pedal. Turn the page, take a picture. I had one and returned it as the image quality wasn’t much different than using my phone and the scanners are expensive.

There’s jigs and rigs you can buy or make for the phone and then just use a scanner app.

You’re going to want to find a solution that will stitch the image together from several scans. I am drawing a blank but I know I saw one in my research, either a phone app or this scanner does it.

Auto feed.

I did this using an HP multifunction laser printer and it took forever. You can get apps that scan the whole area so you can do multiple photos at one time, still took forever.

Bit the bullet and bought a Fujitsu Scan Snap ix1600. It was expensive and soooooooo worth it. Pop a stack of photos in, hit the button, repeat. I banged out hundreds and hundreds of old photos that had been sitting around for years in a couple of weekends.

Now I am digitizing all my books with the same device.

If I had to do it all over again I might get the Brother version, but other than that? Auto feed all the way.

I'm not even sure what my rule is.

I use iCloud, OneDrive, and Sync on all devices. Photos are in iCloud.

All cloud services are set to fully download to an M1 Mac Mini that functions as file server/Plex server.

That Mac Mini has a Sabrent 5 bay enclosure attached with an SSD and two hard drives in it.

Everything on the SSD gets copied to the first of the hard drives nightly, and then that hard drive is cloned to the second drive.

Used to have a fourth drive for Time Machine but it died, will replace it with a Black Friday deal, maybe.

The entire Mac Mini is backed up by Backblaze, even the Plex Media.

I have random old hard drives lying around with the most important stuff (photos, docs) back up, and I am in the middle of preparing M-Disc backups of this as well.

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Future plans:

Still might get a NAS if I have money burning a hole in my pocket.

Going to get a third 8TB hard drive on Black Friday and do a monthly backup, stored at the in laws, rotating with one of the drives here. I used to do this with a safe deposit box but it cost too much and was too much of a pain in the ass to get to.