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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?"
they make cases for these things?!?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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"
It makes for efficient storage, but when you actually need to find a CD, it's even worse than thin cases or binders, because you have to shuffle through a huge stack of discs to find the one you're looking for...and that's assuming that you know which spindle it's on in the first place.
So...basically, for ease-of-location, spindles are a bad idea.
I feel your pain, man. I've moved several times in the last 5 years and jewel & DVD cases have been big problems for me. Here's a couple of things I've done:
1. Ive purchased a few of those Nylon CD case thingies at Best Buy. Okay, I'm an idjit for not knowing the proper name for them, but hopefully you get the idea. I intentionally bought ones that are very different in design so I could tell them apart. I have a grey one that I keep the DVDs in and a black one for backups. I also have a blue one for some of my PS2/Dreamcast games etc.
2. I have a big hard drive that I've copied a number of the CDs to. Nearly all of my driver and application installs are there and I can just browse to the folder and get it started. I've also downloaded cracks for a few of my games so I could do that as well. (I love how that makes me a pirate even thoug I own the game.) Every year or so I buy a new hard drive and move the data over. Lately I've been using external drives so that this process would be a little more laptop friendly.
Eventually I'm going to rip my DVDs and do the same little trick I mentioned in step 2. I have a DVD +RW DVD burner that my DVD player happily plays, so on movie night I can just get a burn going and play it. (More specifically, start the burn the night before... but you probably get what I mean.)
With hard drives as big as they are these days, physical media is becoming more and more of a nuisance. Netflix is looking awfully good to me right now.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.papercdcase.com/images/cd.pdf Can knock em out in 30 seconds once you get the hang of it. Good for mailing and scratch protection, maybe not so great for rough environments.
It depends on two factors:
1) How many CD's there are
2) How often you expect to use them
If there are many CD's, your choices are either thich jewel cases or the circular stacks with the pole in the middle, that come with a bunch of CD's. If you expect to look through them, you should buy the thick jewel cases (or a binder, actually). If you do not, storing them on the large circular things is great, because it does not take up too much space. Essentially, if you want to have it, *just in case*, go with the smallest, least obtrusive method. If you want to use them, then go with something that is easy to look through.
Having said that, I suggest you stop using CD's. Buy a large USB disk, create a backup directory with a bunch of subdirectories, and use that instead. Or even buy an external hard drive for backups. If it's really that important to you, it's worth the cost. Also, consider backing up over a network to another server, as opposed to physical media (or along with physical media).
They are slim cases, but otherwise they are really great: Ejector CD cases. I don't know if they have them in full jewel case width though, probably not, but that's the best I'm aware of.
From Wikipedia:
I'm in the process of disposing of all my CDs as everything I need is safe on my RAID5 back-up server.
To find anything just required a quick search function. If the item is an audio CD ripped to FLAC then I que it up, if the item is an data CD then I mount the image file... My storage space has reduced from several large bookshelves full of CDs down to one small box... As for power consumption, I live in a cold sub-zero-celcius environment and any extra heating is welcome!!!
Does it go on forever?
Inexpensive, biodegradable, and easy. Also helps you rid yourself of the notion that CDs/DVDs are anything more than bits of plastic that somehow merit being displayed on a shelf.
I went through this a couple of years ago. I had just under 2K CDs and spent a few weeks investigating storage alternatives which included everything from the consumer oriented 100-CD display racks for your living room, to large capacity wooden shelving, to painfully expensive specialised office cabinets. Complete waste of time.
Now, everything gets put into a paper window-less sleeve. Each CD gets a number, the relevant info is keyed into a database, and a simple label is applied to the outside of the sleeve. I figure it takes me about 20 seconds for each CD. Compare that to the time and expense of designing/printing/cutting up inserts for jewel cases (slim or otherwise), and you get the idea. If a database isn't your kind of thing, grepping a simple list should work just fine. As a side note, I entertained the idea of printing on the sleeves directly using a LaTeX template, but decided against it and use simple adhesive labels exclusively. Note that I opted for window-less sleeves to avoid having to design and print and insert for each CD.
As for "storing" all the CDs, I just modified a drawer by sectioning it off so that each section would hold exactly 100 CDs. The CDs are stored upright (to protect the CD) and arranged front to back, so finding and retrieving, say, CD number 0983, is quick and easy. Two drawers == 2K CDs. Easily expandable.
As for the old jewel cases, well, they were in mint condition so I gave them to a friend that collects music. Last I heard, he gave them away to a friend of his. I've reclaimed a huge amount of space in my office, and the clutter is gone. I have no "dusting" or similar nonsense to contend with, and made my life is a bit more sane by sticking a few plants on the shelves that were once reserved for CDs. Knowing that my CDs are protected in a cool dry place doesn't hurt, either.
You can buy sleeves directly from any paper manufacturer. There's plenty that offer specialised CD selections that will be happy to sell to you. Alternatively, you can buy a box of 1K from a reseller on eBay for just a few bucks.
As a final note, you may want to investigate something similar ready-made in the form of small metal or plastic boxes that resemble miniature hanging file folders; you can find these in most office-supply stores. The problem I've found with that approach, however, aside from the price, is that each hanging insert is prenumbered (a problem if for large collections) and requires you to squeeze 2 CDs into each. Hardly a safe approach considering how tightly they fit, not to mention that if you remove the entire insert from the box, you'll be carrying around 2 CDs instead of just the one you wanted.
YMMV.