Your friendly neighbourhood sh.it.head
A Reddit refugee after 8 years of Reddit-ing
Whatever file format I use them in is also how I back them up, I backup my entire desktop’s and laptop’s data to an external hard drive and an online service provider. I’m sure a compressed format would be more space efficient but that would take much more time given my use case.
In the case of my laptop it runs Linux and the filesystem I use supports “transparent compression” (almost all contents of the drive are compressed with zstd), so I’m guessing any of the ROMs on there will have already been compressed as nuch as they can (but I’m not knowledgeable enough on the file format specs)
At least when I was in secondary school teachers did not have to confiscate phones, reasonable usage of cell phones was permitted (or laptops for that matter) while unreasonable usage would first result in the instructor asking you to put your phone away and subsequently result in confiscation. Reasonable usage could be using a English-French dictionary online, or taking a photo of a white board. I think it also helped that the school wifi blocked social media and the building had horrendous reception due to the building style, and most VPNs would be blocked so it was difficult to circumvent anyways. I think a complete ban is unreasonable, students should learn how to use technology effectively to ameliorate their education while also learning when it is not appropriate to use it at all (e.g. when the teacher is lecturing).
Edit: I should add for primary school I feel like devices are significantly less useful, and only school owned devices should be used under supervision of staff if necessary (e.g. a computer lab, or a chromebook cart). I do not know how many students bring phones in that age group now, since when I went the most anyone had was an iPod usually except for the rare person with more.
Some older consoles have very negligible size libraries in modern day terms, and who knows what sources of ROMs will be taken down by lawsuits in the next few decades. I feel like there is some sense in making a complete archive of a systems game library, but for my personal use I usually just download / dump / rip what I need specifically.