Are DVD ripping programs safe?

I was able to backup all to an external hard drive as an extra backup and be able to share with my friend. Remember it is Mac DVDRipper Pro (no X). I do have OS X El Capitan Version 10.11.3 and keep it up to date and it worked just great. I am enjoying watching and the extra shelf space in my studio apartment

Storing movies on a hard drive is fine. But you must remember to keep backing them up every 3 to 5 years. I would absolutely hang on to all of your original pressed copies. ( Also proves that the movies were purchased legally.) Pressed DVDs have a shelf life of about 100 years. Hard drives have a much shorter lifetime.

For the longest storage times available there is M-DISC, good for 1000 years. From cnet.

Handbrake is fine. I, and many other people use it for completely legal reasons. Such as what you want to do; access a video on a personal, non-copyrighted disk.

The main thing is to ONLY get it from the original source, which is here:

https://handbrake.fr

It is 2016 so maybe this is old news. I retired and decided to get all my sci-fi movies and tv series DVD's on my relatively new iMac so I can watch on Apple TV. After trying several DVD rippers (MacX is somewhat good, EaseFab is okay but not fast, hour versus minutes and Brorsoft Ripper and Media is AWFUL). MacX and EaseFab (or Avangate) were great and tried to see if they could correct issues but they could not for iMac and they cheerfully and quickly refunded purchase.

Brorsoft (using so many different names, purchase through SWREG Digital River, then a support group) has a 90 day 100% guanratee on their web site and they WOULD NOT honor it. After a few weeks I had to go to my credit card to reject their charge.

Mac DVDRipper Pro for 1/2 the price and no hassle is absolutely great. Under 10 minutes for most DVD disks wth 3 TV hours of a series. I did about 850 GBs in a month (with breaks for eating, sleeping etc.) - approx. 1,750 episodes or hours or movies, over 500 disks. All done and can be transferred to iTunes (ends up in Home Videos but what the heck after watching you delete).

I was able to backup all to an external hard drive as an extra backup and be able to share with my friend. Remember it is Mac DVDRipper Pro (no X). I do have OS X El Capitan Version 10.11.3 and keep it up to date and it worked just great. I am enjoying watching and the extra shelf space in my studio apartment

Onward to binge watching.

Thanks so much for your input. Since there is not an external hard drive available that lasts 1000 years I gather M-DISC is a type of DVD disk) and I don't think I will make that milestone anyway what if I purchased a new external hard drive every year and transferred my current external hard drive to the new one? I do not access my external hard drives very often, perhaps a couple of times in a month. I did purchase two externals just in case.

I also went on line to the Backblaze web site which offers monthly hard drive backup and computer backup to their iCloud for $5.00 a month which includes the external hard drive plugged in at the time of backup (I assume). Would this be a suitable backup plan for my type of use?

I have Time Machine that backs up my computer daily but I really have not gotten into understanding how it works or how I would access an individual file or whatever on it.