Are we talking about 8-track tapes? Still have a few around, because you never know if they’ll become collectible (yeah, right). They’ll be fun for future grandkids to marvel at I suppose.
It just doesn’t seem right to throw out all those Disney VHS tapes. I spent $20 or so for each one in the last 20 years. (I do have a VCR but I’m not going to sit down and watch those movies again!) Every thrift store has a dozen of those tapes - Alladin. The Little Mermaid. The Jungle Book, Toy Story, you name it. Why is it so hard to throw them away?
I still have a couple games on floppy that I have no way of playing. Couple hundred CD’s, games from Super Nintendo on up. God knows what else.
Don’t. DVD’s are on the way of the laser disc. Transfer everything to USB pendrives.
If not for moving and space concerns, I’d still have a stack of “Transactor” magazines from my c-64 computer days, along with my old Amiga magazines. I haven’t had an Amiga in almost 20 years, and a c-64 in about 28 years, but I’d have still kept them. Great memories.
Books. I hate to get rid of books. Again, if not for moving/storage concerns, I’d never get rid of a book that wasn’t falling apart. I have a Kindle I love, but nothing compares for the feel and the random-access speed of a book. I can find a section I’m looking for much more quickly with a traditional book, though I’ll admit that maybe I’m not taking full advantage of all the Kindles features.
I threw out hundreds of LPs back in 1998. I had most of them in CD format. In retrospect, i wish I hadn’t: at minimum, the album covers would’ve made kick-ass wall-hangings. I’ve also given up on CDs. I’ve kept a handful, but for the most part, I’ve switched over to MP3’s. Then, of course, I had to back up my MP3’s, first on CDs, then on DVDs. 
Oh well, Still saved a ton of space.
I FINALLY got rid of my floppy disks and pulled my old, almost-never-used 3.5" drive from my computer last year when I upgraded it. That was very liberating. I’d kept it for so long, “just in case.”
Same thing was said about newspapers and magazines.
Sorry grandpa, they’ll go by the wayside for the majority eventually too. Might take a bit longer, granted, but it’s an inevitably.
It’s the digitization that’s the hard part. Once on a DVD, then copying to future media will be easy. USB flashdrives themselves aren’t really archival and are going to be dead tech themselves in the not too distant future. DVDs are a whole lot cheaper and less likely to fail. They will need to be recopied, but not in the next couple years. Who knows what will be considered archival then?
Anyway, some other media have been brought up that I didn’t cover before:
Floppy disks: Went thru and tossed almost all of those several months back. I was surprised I still had so many. Copied a few off for archiving. Garbage can for those.
Magazines: The only archival worthy one we have gotten in recent years is Consumer Reports. Only keep the last 2-3 years in general but keep several years of the car issue around. (We buy used cars and looking up ratings of models no longer covered by the most recent issues is helpful.)
I have a box with ~200 Silver Age DC Comics. But I don’t consider those “media”. Not in good enough shape to be considered “collectible” or anything. Just nostalgia mementos.
You can have my Atari cartridge of E.T. The Game when you, well, express an interest in taking it off my hands.
My cold dead hands.
I’m dumping magazines after giving them a last readthrough. I’m doing a one-in, two-out on books. I’m getting rid of some tapes as I find stuff online. (But stuff online has a way of disappearing that I’m not comfortable with.) Books will not go away! I’m nobody’s grandpa but I don’t see them inventing the coffee-table e-reader anytime soon.
Somehow I have found that CDs and DVDs are essentially just useless and a waste of space.
I throw them out as quickly as I can but they are like socks or clothes hangars and the just keep on reappearing. I cannot seem to get rid of them as quickly as they keep reappearing.
What’s more, there are about 2 or 3 movies that I would love to see again. I had close to a thousand DVDs and spent many hours searching for those movies but it was a waste of time. I still have never found them.
What the Hell can be done about that? Oh well … piss me off!
I hate physical media. It’s all just a big waste of space, waste of money, waste of materials.
I agree. It’s somewhat disconcerting that I consider optical disc technology to be antiquated. Everything I watch or listen to is on a 3 TB external drive, which is mirrored on another. The only reason I still occasionally buy optical discs is because my wife is deaf and needs the CC. Otherwise I can gleefully toss anything in the dumpster (after I convert it to an .mp3 or .mp4) without a qualm except for nonfiction books.
I toss advance reading copies in the recycling bin. Everything else goes to the library sale. That still leaves a lot of books but I don’t care – I like having them around.
Magazines – I keep old issues of Bookmarks but that’s all. They’re helpful when I’m looking for something to read – helpful review summaries.