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How Do You Store Your Media?
somaamos asks: "Face it, you people have thousands of media items: VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, miniDVs... where are you storing it all? I've been looking for a good storage solution which fits in with normal home furnishings -- something with high storage density, looks nice, consumes little wall space, and makes the media easy to find. Most cabinets and shelving consume lots of wall space and would store only a tenth of my media. The closest thing I've found is from CAN-AM but I'm not sure the metal finish would be suitable for my living room. I don't like the price either, but at this point that is a smaller concern. Any genius ideas out there for this one?"
I guess you're a geek. You could try a hard drive.
Don't buy one of those Ikea all wood living room cupboards that claim to have space for everything. They don't.
Get yourself an attractive metal rack that is sturdy enough to hold all your electronic equipment. Make sure that only the legs rest on the floor so that you have some room underneath the bottom rack to stick other stuff.
Then get some cafe curtains and cardboard boxes and throw anything that you want to keep but don't want to see out in the open in the cardboard boxes and slide the boxes under the rack. Now close the cafe curtains and you've got yourself an attractive setup without all that unsightly crap piled up.
Need more storage space? Get another rack and another set of cafe curtains. Use the rack as a plant stand or something (maybe put speakers on it) and just stick the crap you don't want to see underneath.
It's like magic and it's cheap.
How do you store these things so that your 2-year old doesn't break them? She's already wiped out 2 DVD drives, broken a DVD, broken at least one VHS tape, and scratched too many CDs to count... and of course, anything she sees her daddy playing with, she wants to play with herself! (And she's now smart enough to find the keys and use them to unlock cabinets.)
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
300GB Maxtor HDD
If possible, get big bulky degrading stuff like VHS tapes onto SVCD or DVD. Discs are pretty easy to store. You just have to do away with nonsense like jewel cases and DVD cases. They're bulky and take lots of space. Take the liner notes out of the CD's and put the discs in a cd binder. You can fit several hundred CD's with the notes in a very small amount of shelf space. The only downside is having to realphabetize occassionally as the collection expands, so leave some blank space at the end of each letter, or however you organize them.
If you plan on reselling some of your items some day, put the DVD cases, etc. in a bin in the attic.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
large hard drives- you simply can't beat the accesibility they can offer and you can fit an increasingly large amount of data on one box the size of a novel.
transmission_err
Find a few independent cabinet makers in the area, and find out how much they'll charge to make you some custom cabinets...that don't look like cabinets.
Of course, you'll be paying through the nose.
Alternately, buy the CAN-AM stuff, then screw wood faces on the front if you want to make it look different, or paint it, or otherwise customize it.
If you were the handyman you so desperately ought to be, you wouldn't have even asked. However, building simple, nice shelving with doors or drawers is not really a hard task.
Of course, what you really ought to do is convert everything to digital, then store them in boxes. A server with a terabyte of raid 5 storage is not going to be much more expensive than the amount of shelving you're going to require. You can rip the DVDs exactly and then use Daemon Tools to access them via virtual dvd drives. You can encode VHS tapes into mpeg4 and they will be small.
Start small - hook the vcr to the TV in card and do one or two tapes a day (one every time you check your email and the previous one is done). Then put them in strong boxes, and store them in a cool, dark place. Better protection anyway. The server will give you access on demand, and the original media is good for proof of ownership, as well as a good backup.
Besides, you probably don't need on demand access for 90% of your collection. You just want it.
-Adam
It takes a strong character however to admit that even most of your toy coding projects can easily be "restored" by forgetting about them and using one of the fifty equivalent projects on sourceforge. And no, this is slashdot, I'm not supposed to have a private life.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
... but I rotate hard drives. I buy a new HD every year/year and a half. I rotate the data through there, usually with some redundancy. I don't really advise this to anybody else. I put the really really uber important stuff on CD/DVD, and I have a firewire drive I turn on once a month and do a backup to.
I'm not advocating that people put all their data on HDs and that's it, but I woulud mention that it's always good to prioritize what's really important. Being a packrat isn't advised.
"Derp de derp."
I use storage racks made by Boltz. They're sturdy, attractive (to my eye) and efficient. They are a little costly, but significantly less so than the 1100+ CDs they contain. They're also really responsive to the needs their customers (one of my friends called them and told them the TV stand he bought was a little small for his TV and was flexing a little and within a month they had a larger sturdier one on the market and replaced his old one for free!)
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Unless you plan on showcasing your collection(s), consider adopting a closet in your room with the most media already in it to suit this task. My bedroom closet, aside from storing my hanging shirts, also has racks upon racks upon racks of CDs and DVDs. It works for me. All of those stacks of manuals and [plug type='shameless'] O'Reilly books also reside there.
The storage units themselves weren't a kit. Nothing beats a table saw, a good mouse sander, and a trip to Home Depot. Or Lowes. Or something. Just some lumber. Only took a weekend to get it all together, and it was one of the best weekends I ever spent in my room.
Informatus Technologicus
Fine, I'll take yours.
InterMetro (or similar) wire shelving ( http://www.containerstore.com/browse/index.jhtml?C ATID=13370 )
White cardboard & metal boxes from IKEA
CaseLogic ProSleeves (or similar)
the media go into the sleeves, which go into the boxes (alphabetized by title for video, artist for audio) which go onto the shelves...
Ceci n'est pas un post.
The place where I keep most of my CDs... The floor of my car. Some loose, some in a binder, the store-bought ones in their case. All the latest ones, and the newer mixes that I've burned all go into a pile above my sun-visor. Yah, some have some pretty fierce scratches, but it's a handy place to keep them. My wife doesn't like it when I pull a sharp left -occasionally a few break loose and fall into her lap startling her..
..........FULL STOP.
first off, i could swear we've discussed this before, but i'm too tired/lazy to dig up the url.
anyway, go to used office furniture stores. you'd be surprised what you can find. i found a used fireproof case, meant for 8.5" x 5.5" inch cards, like deeds, that works PERFECT for cd cases. it fits 4 across, about 75 deep, and has 5 drawers. of course, it weighs about 1200 lbs., being insulated beeyond helief, and it's not fine for the living room, but for $200 it was a bargain.
on the other side of things, i found a nice elm mail sorting unit that does work excellently as shelving, and fits in a living room for about $100.
trick i've found in general is that anything that's *designed* for a purpose usually costs twice as much as something else that is.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
It's called a cabinet.
I've a few backup CDs of my $HOME which I store on a regular CD spindel(?) since I don't look thru them anyway. My old Amiga flkoppy disks are in regular paperboxes which works great and my DVDs are in a file/binder/whatever-the-english-word-for-swedish- parm-is containing plastic sheets which can hold 6 DVDs each. the alternative would be to get lots of DVD cases and print out covers but it would use so much space so I prefer this solution.
But it really is a great simple product! (I'm not just the owner, I'm a user :).
For any CD storage system (sleeves, jewel cases, whatever), tabbed plastic dividers come in pretty handy when you need to organize hundreds or thousands of CDs: http://discdividers.com
DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
dromme cabinet from ikea, holds 882 cds, 306 dvds, or 153 videos. costs CA$150 , black&white lacquered.
.
. hmmm
Other than that, the stuff gets put in boxes and piled up in a storage room. Gets annoying when you're trying to find stuff though.
One last thing. I've had great success with a number of old library card cabinets. 7x7 drawers they suit CDs, VHS, Atari carts, Magic the Gathering storage boxes, etc, etc...
When I store my cd's I use a geometrically arranged pattern of stacking, generally refered to as a 'pile'. Around my desk there are several piles of cd's that seems to merge with the cheetos and empty soda cans into a single big pile. Moving on to my living room, there is another 'pile' of DVD's on my TV and on my DVD player. It really is a versatile solution. It expands easily, finding what you want is easier than it looks as you can create a seperate pile for your most needed/used items. It works for more than just DVD's and CD's and can be expanded to include clothing, magazines/newspapers, old pizza boxes (for those linux in a pizza box experiments), bills, books.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Drill some holes in the wall. Put some shelves up. There's a hell of a lot more space at 4ft about floor level.
Honestly though, mounting ISO images of CDs commonly used at work is surpassed in usefulness only by my boot floppy image collection. Now if only I could rid myself of the floppy disk entirely!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
You can easily fit a thousand or more CDs in a decent sized box.
If you have media that's not on CD or DVD, then you should put it there.
You can't conveniently get to it at the bottom of the box, but that's not really a problem. It's temporary.
When you decide DVD media is cheap enough you copy all your CDs to DVD and your box of a thousand becomes a box of a hundred and fifty or so. The old box of CDs can be buried out in the yard. Use lots of dessicant and vapor barrier, it will be fine.
Okay, a few years later you do the same thing with your growing DVD collection --transfer to BluRay and stash the DVDs. Now your thousands of DVDs have become a small binder of BluRay discs. And don't worry, they'll have media without the cartidges at least in the 20G sizes so you can still stack them by the thousands in a little box.
Of course by then a box of a thousand would be like 20TB which might not sound like much, but it could be more than you have to time to browse through unless there is some sort of life extension action going by that point.
And that's in a box that could easily go unnoticed sitting in the corner.
And then of course there would be the multi layered discs that may eventually hold TBs on a single disc or nanoscale chip or polymer based memory in the TB range. Either way, long term you don't have to worry about where to put it all. There will be more than enough room for more than you will ever have a chance to even want to save. Just get it out of the way for now.
And for all these smug minimalists. I know your types. Don't go asking me for no backups. Yeah, they don't need anything that doesn't fit on a floppy or mini-CD. Mmm hmm, right as long as they know they can borrow it from their packrat buddies.
Nice idea, but beware, media is more sensitive to fire than paper, thus a "firesafe" is not a good place for media in the event of a fire. You need a "mediasafe" if you want to keep media through a fire. Paper is not damaged by steam, so most "firesafes" work by having a lining with a lot of water trapped inside, when the safe gets hot that water boils, taking the energy of the fire with it.
Even if you have the right safe, they are only rated for a short time, so if you live in an area where the fire department cannot respind quickly you may need more protection. For fire purposes keep all valuable togather, and if there is a fire have the fire department concentrate on saving that one area of the house. (Make sure your safe is waterproof!) For thief protection, that isn't always the best solution.
Do a net search for firesafe, gun safe (avoid the gun safety links, but gun owners as a group are more interested in safes than most people so their knowlege is worth getting)
Cliff, you could of course just ask Can-Am directly :) We can get you a sample of the metal finish, and there are lots of people have it in their living room (me included!)
We were featured in Home magazine recently you know.
John
I've got too much crap. It's kind of upsetting to even think about how much stuff I've acquired over the years.
With this in mind, I've given away all of my VHS tapes, permanantly loaned out my VCR, etc. I went out and bought an iPod, and started ripping all of my CD's and throwing out the jewel boxes. I also back up my data onto DVD+R's. Now I'm stuck with tons of CD-type media. I recommend getting a bunch of great big CD wallets that will fit nicely into just about any bookshelf. It might not be a particularly innovative solution, but it works for me.
-Turkey
Doesn't everyone use an abandoned iron mine for this stuff? What rock did you hide under for the last decade?!?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
My girlfriend and I just picked up one of these cabinets from IKEA. It comfortably holds somewhere around 800+ CD's in a little over 1m X 1m X 20 cm space. It's eaten 400 of my cds easily with plenty of room leftover for all our DVD's and VHS tapes.
1. Cut big hole in sheet rock-- for aesthetic reasons you probably should go about the same size as other windows, but bigger is ok-- it will look like a monster picture window on the interior wall. Oh yeah, do your best to make sure you don't have power and/or pipe problems. I had to re-route a power cable, but not too bad.
2. Cut out some 2x4 framing, but probably not all. I left one in the middle and dressed it up with trim/quarter round; it looks good like a piece of window framing.
3. Prime, paint inside piece of sheetrock (this is the backside of the wall on the other side). Mine is real nice color of blue. It looks great and is striking from the white wall and shelving. If you know someone artistic, have them do mural or something.
4. Build shelving frame and pieces and nail'em in.I framed the top, bottom, and sides exactly the same as the shelves themselves. It's big box I assembled in the wall, with shelves.
Mine sticks out from the wall about an inch and half-- fits those old stupid fancy VHS cases perfectly, as well as dvd's, picture frames, books, etc. You get a bit over five inches if I remember correctly. The bottom three shelves are just tall enough for those stupid moster VHS tape boxes, and the upper two or three are different sizes to accomodate big 8x10 frames, books, etc. It is now media storage and display case.
5. Stand back and soak in the admiration of family and visitors.
Tools needed: measuring tape, pencil, table saw or similar, hammer, paint brush, spackle knife, hand saw for frame removal, router if you need to make some fancy trim to cover a frame piece left in (I also routed slots for the shelves), brain.
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
We wanted a cabinet for our stereo/tv setup and so we looked around for awhile before giving up and getting one custom made. Turned out very nice, and not hideously expensive. It's got the hole for the 32" tv, with two drawers underneath, 300 CDs per drawer (also holds VHS or DVD, and are deep enough for even the horrible disney cases). To the right of the TV is the component stack, and underneath that is cubbyhole for all the assorted junk that goes along with it like cables and headphones, album cleaner kits, etc.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
You're thinking about it backwards, protecting things from two-year-olds is basically impossible. Instead,try this: Vari Kennel These are great: tough, reliable, fairly cheap, widely available, and come in different sizes.
I have all my media (CD's, DVD's, Games that are on one of those two media) in the big flip books w/ zippers for easy access. I keep track of the CD's DVD's Games and Books I own using a website called Mediachest.com. I used to use DVD profiler but then I found Mediachest and switched because it offers the ability to keep track of everything you own, not just DVD's.
My DVD and Game Collection Tracking L
How Do You Store Your Media?
Is that some sort of geek come-on?
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
My really, really important stuff is stored in a safe deposit box at a local bank. I have digital copies of treasured family photos. I will be adding DVDs converted from video tapes shortly. The plan is to keep original media relatively safe in the house, but to maintain an offsite archive in case anything happens to the house.
Music CDs, movies, games, etc., really don't matter and can be insured in any case. I'm not torqued up about my kid gnawing on Tomb Raider or anything. I'm worried about stuff that I can't replace.
Safe deposit boxes are unbelievably cheap. There's no reason not to rent one.
Media issues have been addressed elsewhere in this topic, so I won't mention them other than to say CD and DVD are not forever. Maybe a big old hard drive might not be a bad idea. I think WD just spit out a 300 GB model. Put a couple of those into enclosures with USB, and you may be set for a while -- do DVD & CD in the short term and put it onto the hard drives every year or so.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits