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Replacement for Jewel Cases?
PsychoBrat asks: "I'm surrounded by jewel cases at work and at home, and although most of them are still holding together to some extent, a lot of them have either cracked fronts, broken hinges or snapped teeth. Slim cases generally annoy me because I can't tell them apart by looking at their spines, and wallets take too long to sort through. What do you use in place of the standard fragile jewel cases to keep all your discs organized?"
what it's for. If it's DVDs for the kids it goes in a folder. If it's essential backups they go in hard cases. If it's one of the zillions of other backups I make I simply title them, date them, and drop them right back on a spare spindle. They take up less space, they are as protected as any other method, and I know before hand that chances are I wont ever need to look at them again, but just in case, I've got them.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
I think it helps to think about this problem and identify some basic constraints:
1. You want to organize a great number of physical items. This means you simply need a proportional amount of space, unless you use a more efficient (i.e. physical volume per byte) storage medium
2. You want a system that allows for easy access and identification of these items. This will require even more space, unless you offload access and/or identification to magical computer land.
Just writing those two things out has led me to think of a number of possible solutions outside grappling for some magical panacea to CD storage:
As for constraint #1, consider buying a hard-drive and migrating CD contents to the drive.
As for constraint #2, there are a couple of ways to go. You could buy/build some sort of system that stores and retrieves CDs for you. Then you wouldn't need a bulky jewel case, just a bar code. In a similar but simpler vein, just make a database of all your CDs. There is a surprising amount of information present in the cases, which is why you want full view of them. But get that information in a database and you can use a simple UID to identify CDs. Then you can store CDs in small cases or even a binder.
In fact, if you go to a UID system, you can put all your CDs in one of those big binders. If you keep them ordered by UID then you can access via binary search -- get your big O down to log(n)!
RAID is PART of the solution. The problem with RAID is that it doesn't account for Operator Error (deletion), Operating System Error (corruption at the filesystem level), Virii, etc. RAID is a great online-storage mechanism, but should be only an intermediary to tape/dvd/'permanent' media.
While permissions, ACLs, etc, can reduce the risk, RAID still doesn't protect your data from the more immediate threat.
Also note that RAID does not account for fire, flood, lightning and other things that may irreparably screw over the drives. Last I knew, Ontrac and others still charge by the size of the drive, and if you're using big disks, you'll pay a fortune. With RAID, generally the platters inside the disk must be relatively unharmed (no gauging, cracking, corrosion, etc) since you cannot do a recovery based on the file allocation tables since you don't have all of the data on the one disk. If they can transplant the platters into a happy drive, you may be ok, but I wouldn't bet my inheritance on it.
Now, if you can afford to create two RAIDs and keep one (if one is bigger, the bigger one) offline except when copying things that have changed in, you're in better shape- and even better shape if that is located in a different building or even locality.