If you are donating stacks of discs to a thrift store, make sure there's nothing on them you don't want to give away first. I bought a pack of CDs from a thrift store a while ago. I checked a couple at the top of the stack before I bought them and they were blank. I used about half of them without issue and when I put the next one in the drive, it mounted and opened. Someone gave away a whole bunch of banking info and tax records. I used them for target practice, but someone certainly could have used that info for identity theft if they chose to.
I went through every single disc before I donated them, yeah. Actually I did some organization so one spindle was all Anime, another was all SciFi, so on.
...found a fair bit of porn. I kept the porn. TV series are ephemeral. Porn is eternal.
My backup method was almost entirely optical. Oh well. I’ve kept myself from feeling too bad by keeping in mind that I am waaaaay too lazy to ever go digging through it anyway.