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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?"
Living in a colege dorm I have to be really concearned about keepiing all my disk organized and not taking up too much room. I have a 360 capacity binder I use for my DVDs, a 280 binder I use for TV Shows, a 240 binder for games, and a 128 binder for drivers. I suggest looking on ebay for binder this size becasue retail places will just rip you off
Don't you hate pants?
I use those 100 CDR stack spindles that media come in. People at the office never re-use them, so I just grab'em, take'em home, and stack my media on them. Makes in a little of a pain to find stuff, but I use little bits of sticky notes to index major sections (OSs, Windows drivers, games, etc).
It's not ideal, but it works better than anything else I've found to date.
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.
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.
I make copies of all my CDs, and leave the originals in the jewel case at home on a bookshelf. I don't bother to index them because I rarely look for one in that mess.
I keep the copies in small binders (I like the 72 disk ones, which work for me) in the car. I keep an assortment in each, and just take one binder at a time. It might not always have the exact disk I'm looking for when I want a particular one, but normally I just want music so it doesn't matter so long as there is a variety.
I have a 60 disk changer for my music in the living room. Not enough, but still useful, I just stock it with my long term favorites and live with the selection. (I don't use that stereo much so it isn't too big a deal)
I'm considering ripping everything to a server, and sharing things, but so far I haven't bothered. Still I dream of a nice box on my stereo that will play any of my music. (I even bought one once, but I returned it after I read the software license agreement)
I run only FreeBSD so all my software comes from ports. If I loose it I just download a new copy from the net. Someplace I have a few OS/2 programs on a shelf somewhere, though I'd be surprised if they were still readable.
I don't own a TV, I recommend you throw yours away too. If you are not willing for that (which is nearly everyone) I can't help you, though some of the above ideas might apply somehow.
Allsop has a ton of robust cd storage, check out the cd albums and disc storage boxes. Might not be in the quantity you want, but at least they look better than that black cd case you're using now.
Get a better binder. A good product shouldn't become ruined simply because you filled it to capacity.
Stay away from Best Buy. Most of their accessories are pure crap.
But since you bought it from Best Buy, did you buy the $39.99 annual replacement policy?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Other people have good ideas.
But I'd suggest step one is to simplify your life; if you're at all like me, you don't need all those CDs. I don't even mean in the "if you're not careful, your possessions possess you" sense (although if you want to go that route, that can help too), I mean in the "drivers for the motherboard two motherboards ago that went up in smoke" or "drivers for my nVidia Riva 128 that even if I installed in a system again I'd just download" or "free trial version crap included in a box of Cheerios".
I was beginning to have this problem too, but lo, I cleaned out my CDs, wasn't even too aggressive about it, and lo, well over half of the CD-ROMs were garbage and suddenly I didn't have a problem anymore.
Obviously, this doesn't apply to music CDs, but this can help with the CD-ROM problem.
(If you've already done this, then consider this advice for others.)
My advice to you would be to convert your archives to DVD. If keeping them in 650/700MB cd format is important, make .iso images of the CD's and save a few of them on the DVD and use something like daemon tools or alcohol 120% to mount the iso's as you need them. The conversion alone should save you at LEAST 5 times the number of disc's.
Take a deep breath and throw most of them out... Most of your stuff (drivers etc) can be redownloaded and once your data hits CDs most of them will never be put into your CD-drive again...
sigfault. comment dumped.
http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductsList.asp?Name=cd+cas e
It is basically a large metal case, quite hard to destroy and has single inserts for each disc.
I would highly recommend it, I have many friends who use these for when they are doing dj'ing at clubs to take their music collection on the road.
Kind regards
My advice is basically to not have so many freakin' CDs.
Seriously, unless you're starting some kind of kitchy museum, you really don't need to keep all of that stuff.
Drivers? Get on the web, download the latest versions of everything, put them all on one CD. I guarantee that there is nothing else on those driver disks that's worth keeping.
Games/Movies? Trust me, you do not need too keep every single one you ever purchased. I know it's tempting to keep them "just in case", but that case will never come. Sell them used or give them away. If it's in your closet now it can't be that worth keeping.
Backups? Who are you kidding? I can't think of many scenarios where an individuals vital data would take up more than a handful of CDs or one DVD. There is some stuff that just isn't worth the hassle of backing up like that. If you've got a bunch of ripped music or something just mirror it onto an external hard disk.
I say this as a reformed packrat.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
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.
I picked up one of these Discgear things at a local discount store and it's been working pretty well.
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
I bought four 220 disc holders last month that seem pretty good, from supermediastore.com (I am in no way affiliated with them.) They have a carrying strap and they zip closed.
This space available.
For each system i've built for friends and family lately i've gotten an expanding file for all their manuals and docs and shit, and a .97 12-CD case for all their driver disks, and tuck it in teh back pocket of the expanding file. Makes it nice for me when i go to work on stuff and need a disc or manual, i know where they are and they won't lose the damned things either. The binders i bought were bright colors too, so it would either be easy to spot, or easy to remember where they hid it. This system worked so good i went to it at home, since i never use driver discs but want to keep them around JIC, i use cheap binders and keep all my docs and discs for each system together. For my core of software discs i have an alstop steel case binder sitting on my desk that has a ton of stuff stacked on it now, doesn't mind the abuse. It came with 12 sleeves but i have about 15 in it and it doesn't mind. I have several 50 Disc spindles in the closet, some full of AOL discs (frisbee parties, coasters, whatever i need'em for) some full of old music CD-Rs i've burnt over the years. In my toolbox i have one of those visor CD holders with copies of WinXP, Win98 Win2000 a linux boot disc and a semi-up-to-date compilation of troubleshooting and fix-it software.
If you look in the rubbermaid tote section of walmart they have some fliptop boxes that are made for jewel cases and others that are made for DVDs. I have one cd box i use for my game cases (the games are in a binder somewhere around here...) and several DVD boxes i use to keep all my DVDs contained (but i always end up with a large stack on my desk...).
Anyway, there is no RIGHT way to do this, i've found. It either works for you, or it doesn't, end of story. PLay around til you come up with a system that works for ya, and go from there.
When it comes to data CD's with drivers, etc. I just am not able to convince myself to get rid of them, so I went to and downloaded DiskTracker. It is MacOS X only, but it is an awesome application. There is probably something similar for Windows (Check Versiontracker).
After installing Disktracker I made sure that it serializes each CD with a simple number 1,2,3,etc. and bought some CD Binders (Fellowes seem to be sturdy enough). Now I am in the process of:
- Insert CD
- Let Disktracker catalog it
- Eject CD
- Write Serial Number on it with Sharpie Marker
- Insert into Binder
- When Binder is full write on outside something like 0001-0128
- Repeat ad naseum
:)
The System seems to work pretty good. Now when I need any particular file, I just open up disktracker, search for it using the built-in search function and then find out what CD number it is on. I open the proper binder, take out the CD and use it, then return it to its proper place.I have probably another 750-1000 CD's to go, but they now take up significantly less space and that in itself is worth the time I spend cataloging them.
+(norad) if you rearrange the letters in mother in law, you get woman hitler
Drivers? Get on the web, download the latest versions of everything, put them all on one CD. I guarantee that there is nothing else on those driver disks that's worth keeping.
Great, unless you can't find it on the web when you need it. Or you need a newer version since you upgraded some software, or you need an older version than the one you did burn, or you can't install just the driver without having the super-duper-install-drivers and-tons-of-crap-you-don't-need CD.
Games/Movies? Trust me, you do not need too keep every single one you ever purchased. I know it's tempting to keep them "just in case", but that case will never come. Sell them used or give them away. If it's in your closet now it can't be that worth keeping.
What? And jettison my 400 SVCD collection of my former VHS collection of crappy sci-fi movies?!? Why, just yesterday I watched episode 3 of Space:1999 ("Black Sun"), and I liked it!
Backups? Who are you kidding? I can't think of many scenarios where an individuals vital data would take up more than a handful of CDs or one DVD. There is some stuff that just isn't worth the hassle of backing up like that. If you've got a bunch of ripped music or something just mirror it onto an external hard disk.
I can back up everything important on one CD. It's much easier to do a full backup once a week than to do an incremental backup since I don't have any backup software to figure out which of the 8,000 files changed. Some of us work from home and might just need to grab some file from a month ago.
I say this as a reformed packrat.
You've lost your edge. What happens when you need that PDP-11 you just threw away? That 300 Baud acoustic modem? Moebius for the Amiga? That Video Toaster you swore you'd use to make a short film? A spare A1000 for parts? Need to make a Mac SE fishtank, but threw away the half dozen (still working) Macs? I've got all those and more, just waiting for the moment they're desperately needed!
I say this as a true packrat: Keep packing and ratting until it's not safe to open the door to your storage area. Then go rent another one.
Here come da fudge!
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Great, unless you can't find it on the web when you need it. Or you need a newer version since you upgraded some software, or you need an older version than the one you did burn, or you can't install just the driver without having the super-duper-install-drivers and-tons-of-crap-you-don't-need CD.
You are totally missing the point. The parent said to get all the latest versions of the drivers off the web and burn them to one CD. There is no need to keep 15 CDs around for 15 piceces of hardware when the drivers only take 20MB or less on each CD.
I can back up everything important on one CD. It's much easier to do a full backup once a week than to do an incremental backup since I don't have any backup software to figure out which of the 8,000 files changed. Some of us work from home and might just need to grab some file from a month ago.
So you can back up everything on one CD - fantastic! So, why do you ever need more than 2 backup CDRWs then? One for current backup, one for the last one. If everything you need to back up fit son one CD, you don't need to keep a stockpile of old backups around.
What? And jettison my 400 SVCD collection of my former VHS collection of crappy sci-fi movies?!? Why, just yesterday I watched episode 3 of Space:1999 ("Black Sun"), and I liked it!
You need to look at this logically. Assuming you are an averagely busy person who has time to watch 2-3 movies a week, if you have a 400 SVCD collection of movies, even assuming that you watched only those movies for an entire year, the odds of you watching any given one of those movies is less than 0.5%. Assuming you do other things than watch crappy old movies (like watch crappy new ones), your eyes will probbaly never even look at 75% of that colleciton for your whole life.
Go through them, pick out your true favorites, toss the rest. You will thank yourself later when your GF stops calling your place a hellhole and starts spending time there.
I wish I could find Tyvek sleeves, but nobody seems to sell em anymore, they might take fractionally less space than paper, they're thinner.
Tyvek sleeves, though they are quite a bit more expensive than paper sleeves. I bought a spindle of TY 8x DVD+R's from them a couple weeks back. Shipped out same day I ordered.