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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"
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.