> Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid of them. Sometimes you're the person who is uploading them to public archives. Because everybody

> Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid of them. Sometimes you're the person who is uploading them to public archives. Because everybody else threw them all away, and you saved them until the technology made archiving practical enough. I've been replacing all of my physical media for years, but the reason I can do that now is because other people scan/rip and archive/share the stuff. You also have unique stuff that you may not even know is unique. When you find something in your house that you can't find online, scan it and you're paying everybody back for all of the scanning they did for you. With the CD-ROMs, you should just glide through them one by one and check if you can find the stuff online. If you can, throw them in the trash. If you can't, copy their contents to a folder, and throw them in the trash. Go through the folder over the next hour or next 20 years (however long it takes to get around to it) and take the things you can't find online that you think somebody might want, and get those things to that somebody (uploading to archive.org is always a good place to start.) edit: I know for a fact that for a lot of people, uploading somewhere on the internet is their standard pre-deletion ritual.