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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.
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.
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.
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.
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