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CD Storage Advice?
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm up to my ears in CDs! Driver discs, games, software, music, data backups, you name it. Right now they're all stashed in various jewel cases and sleeves, and dumped into boxes in my closet. What's the best way to sort and store them? I bought a 128-disc storage binder, but once it filled, it tore apart from the weight. Any ideas? Does anyone make large-capacity binders that are sturdier than the average stuff you'd find at a Best Buy? What do you use?"
Here's my suggestion:
Most CDs that I get, like drivers or even most software, don't take up the full space, nor do they have any copy-protection. I would highly recommend getting a program like DAEMON Tools (which last I checked was free), and use another tool, whether an ISO maker like WinISO or similar, or Nero, or something open-source, to make images of the files.
A lot of them will be under 200 MB, and so you could easily stuff a ton of them on a 4.7 GB DVD.
Before proceeding, especially with drivers, make sure you have the latest version, if you're going to bother. No point in backing up a 3 year old CD to DVD if the downloadable drivers are newer.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
I taped togther a box for my discs. I put a cardboard separator in to make a few rows, and put in paper bookmarks to denote sections (music CDs, Live CDs, DVDs, etc.). Even a small box will hold a few hundred discs, and unlike with a spindle, you don't have to remove the ones on the top to get to the ones on the bottom.
Most driver CD's and such only take up a small portion of the disc.
I normally take as many of them as I can, copy the files over to my hard drive in a folder. Remove any IE install folders or Quicktime, or Direct X. Then once you reach 700 MB Burn it to a disc.
Store the original disc in a box who cares about it anymore, you could probably throw it away. (Not to mention most drivers can be gotten from the internet in a more up to date version anyways). And then write all the things on the compilation CD on its label.
Keep your compilation CD's stored in a good CD case.
To find files on a whole shelf of spindles, do "find . -print > cd$x_$y.txt" on any freshly-toasted CD. Label the CD "spindle $x, cd $y". Store "cd$x_$y.txt" on your hard disk, a USB thumb drive or a distinguishable (colored, different brand etc.) multi session CD. A single "grep $something cd*.txt" would find any stored file.
Like you I keep all of my original safe at home in the original jewel case. I ripped all of my CDs to FLAC using abcde (download it if it is not in ports it is only a shell script). FLAC is lossless so you will never have to rip your CDs when a better audio compression comes out. And it is simple to transcode FLAC to a more portable format like ogg:vorbis. All of the music is ripped and stored on a headless silent computer connected to my stereo. I control audio playback with Music Player Daemon. I also share the FLAC files (readonly) so that I can easily burn CDs and transcode from my workstation.
Things to watch out for: Some sound cards suck, most clip at higher volumes. When ripping CDs the various cddb sources are wrong as often as the data is correct. Verify all cddb results before ripping. The exception is the genre tag. That is almost always wrong. I strip the tag after ripping. For some reason one person's polka is another person's alternative.
On a shelf. They don't really take up a whole lot of space if you use shelves that are properly small. Not portable, but you can find stuff a LOT faster than any other storage method.
/usr/games/fortune
At less than 50 cents per gigabyte, you can store a lot of stuff on hard drives quite inexpensively, and storage prices are only going to drop.
I rip CDs, both audio and data, and store the ISOs on hard drives. For $90 you can get a 200GB drive, that's enough room to store 285 full CD images, uncompressed. In practice, most CDs aren't full, and most of them can be compressed quite a bit, so in reality one 200GB drive can hold around a thousand CDs.
For audio, I rip and Vorbis-encode them to roughly 256 kbps, which mashes a typical album down to about 90MB without losing any quality I'm ever going to have equipment to hear. At that rate, even a *huge* audio collection will fit on one 200GB drive. I actually do keep the originals of audio CDs, but storing them is much easier if you expect never to have to find them. I recommend using a relative's basement. (Plug: If you run Linux or a BSD, check into madman; it's an awesome music manager).
For data, I rip the ISOs using 'dd' and then loop mount them when I need them. On Windows you can use any of various rippers and mount them on a virtual CD-ROM drive with Daemon Tools.
If I need to take CDs with me, I usually either keep the ISOs on my laptop hard drive, or if drive space is getting tight I burn them to a DVD. For example, although I run Linux/*BSD exclusively, I occasionally need Windows or Windows apps (under VMWare), so I have a DVD labeled "Microsoft Stuff" that contains CD ISOs for Win2K, Office, Visio, MS Project, Visual C++, etc.
For those few times when it's more convenient to have an actual CD, rather than just an image, my laptop has a CD burner, my desktop has a DVD burner, my wife's laptop has a CD burner, my kids' desktop has a CD burner... you get the idea. I usually carry a small number of CD-Rs with me so I can just burn what I need when I need it. When I'm done, I label the CD (with a Sharpie marker) and hold onto it for a while on the theory that I might need it again soon, but as soon as they start to pile up I just trash the whole pile. I don't worry about the cost of the CD-Rs because I've got several hundred disks that I got for "free" (mail-in rebate >= sale price). It does sometimes seem wasteful to treat CDs as disposable, but mostly I manage to avoid needing them at all, so it's not so bad.
I've even begun moving a large part of my movie collection to hard disks. I use mythtv's transcoding daemon to automagically rip and recompress DVD movies and I'm working on using my Mini-DV camera to convert VHS movies to DV and then transcoding them to MPEG-4. I really only do this with the kids' movies, because I notice the compression artifacts, slight as they are. Each movie compresses to between 1 and 2 GB, so I can store around 120 of them on one 200GB drive. That's a lot cheaper than re-buying DVDs that my three year-old has trashed. This way the kids have a nice menu of movies to pick from without ever touching a disk.
As storage sizes continue to increase, I plan to eventually put all of our VHS and DVD collection on my server. I'll probably have to keep disks around for a while when we start getting real HD content on Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, but I imagine storage sizes will eventually increase to where ripping those is economical as well.
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