I don’t know how much this has been answered yet, but… What in the Tammy Faye Baker is a blue ray drive???
Look for an external solid state drive. A hard drive has a spinny component and is more succeptible to breaking, an SSD is more sturdy.
Backing any digital media up is a fantastic idea. Blue ray is moreso a feature of your DVD/CD rom, and doesn’t matter at all for digital files.
I’m quite curious as to what the heck a blue ray drive is.
Oh, also, check thrifts and recycle stores before anywhere else. Ask lots of questions, you can usually get working things for good prices (at least where I live…)
A Blu-ray disc drive is an external disc drive specifically designed to play Blu-ray discs. I don’t think that a generic DVD disc drive will play Blu-rays.
Ah I remember that my dad’s old laptop had a disc drive… It was the best
Yet HDDs are cheeper and can last longer without the need to connet it to a power. Just store it in somewhere safe and don’t drop it then you’ll be fin. I got a 2TB hard drive for all my films and animes. My audios are all on a 512GB microSD card so that I can access my entire library via a MP3 player on the go.
I didn’t really want to throw a curveball in here but what the heck let’s do this.
You could also back up to cloud storage, I use iCloud (I have an iCloud Family account and together we have 4TB of storage).
This has the following pros:
The only real downside is that I have to pay monthly, although it also automatically backs up my phone and computer, my photo library etc, and it’s all simple to use - that’s what you get being an Apple user! (Although it also works on Windows, and solutions for Windows and Android do exist)
Yeah but I thought the point of an external hard drive was that it is there in my possession. If it’s on the cloud and the internet ain’t working, I ain’t going to be getting at it.
But thanks for the curve ball. (And I don’t do Apple, so I’d need an alternative to that).
I skipped what I do for storage just because it’s more involved on the tech side setting it up.
I’ve got this gadget called an NAS. I stuck two internal hard drives into it and stuck it on my network. It’s basically a small dedicated computer, and if I go to one web address, it lets me set it up and configure it.
It shows up on my local network as a network drive, and I put all my files on there and grab them from there. Works even if the internet is down, as long as I’m at home.
I know there are words in that post but that is about as far as my brain has got with understanding it… 
Which is pretty much why I didn’t go into it originally…
PLEX server supremacy 
Also as much as Cloud storage seems convenient and has a lot of good user-features, the unfortunate reality is that access to your files and that storage is still contingent on both an ongoing contract AND the capability of the company to keep your data safe/secure. Buying a hard drive and having that data backed up there as well as on your main machine is, imo, about as safe as Cloud storage, if not more, because you only have to worry about your house burning down and not anyone else’s.
Cloud storage is really only worth it if you can guarantee your internet connection is reliable. And I mean reeeally reliable. Cloud storage is good if you need to store unimportant files on your PC, but don’t need them taking up tons of space in your filesystem. Proton drive is the only cloud storage (that I know of) you should be using. Do not use onedrive or google drive.