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Storage System for Thousands of CDs and DVDs?
Lucy V. asks: "My husband works for a firm in New York that receives customer data on CD and DVD. After copying the data to their server, they are required to retain the original media for several months until the job is delivered and the customer has approved the work.
It is common for the firm to have 30,000 CD's and DVD's on hand at any one time. They are struggling to find a better storage solution than what they have now as the current setup is awkward and requires quite a bit of space. They are removing the media from the jewel case and slipping them into one of those large notebook style disk holders and then storing the notebook on a shelf.
I have spent quite a bit of time doing web searches for CD and DVD storage but nearly all the racks that I find are low capacity ones intended for home use. I have found one vendor called Can-Am that makes a high quality steel drawer system that might fit the bill." Has anyone found (or put together) a storage system that can handle thousands of discs?
How about a bookshelf, or some of the spools that new CDs come in? I would think you could buy those in bulk somewhere.
Buy a few crates of cake containers from a CD or DVD distributor. Then hire an intern. Label each CD with a sequential number and label the cake containers with their sequence number. A simple Excel sheet or simple database can handle mapping a CD with who it came from and the date to a cake container/CD number. The intern then fetches said CD.
Remember, interns are cheaper than actual solutions.
Easy. The same as with paper documents. Put them into proper envelopes and boxes and into shelves in some offsite magazine. There are loads of established paper documents storage systems - you label it, put it into database, do monthly check and retire old stuff etc.
You don't need to have quick access to these CDs, you have digital copies on servers so you just need it in emergency.
You need normal storage same as for paper documents.
It looks like you're trying to find a "better way" to store these vast libraries of CD and DVD materials rather than rolling your own. You should contact a company that builds multi-tier racking for books, cd's tapes, x-rays, etc. The companies that make x-ray film libraries in the US do the same thing for other media types as well.
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"Keep the original CD" sounds like a silly requirement.
:)
Yes, but legal work often has all sorts of silly requirements. Sometimes you do need the original rather than a certified copy.
Me, I would copy the CD to an iso file, make it read-only, stick a barcode on the physical CD, then ship the physical CD to an offsite storage facility. If they ever need the physical CD they can get it, but otherwise you work from the iso.
I'd bet you could ROI the "don't keep the original CDs" plan to under a year.
Yes, but you would have to include "lose the legal work" in your ROI calculation
You're going to keep the CDs for a couple months and only need them for some legal/contract requirement, so you don't need to "file" them. Just get a long metal bar (or bars) and put the CDs on them as they come in. Of course label them and keep a database, but basically once the bar fills up you just start taking them off the back end and check the database whether they can be thrown out. If so, toss. If not, put back either on the back of bar or front.
This is way more space efficient than folders and prevents them from getting 'stuck' to the soft plastic if the environment is bad. It's far cheaper and also easier. A "proper" system will of course have small sections that can be taken out to retreive a particular CD without too much effort... take some out, check with database, do binary search to find CD. This should be such a rare occurrence that the time to locate a particular CD.
If you have other requirements please elaborate... such as having to return the CD when the work is done. If not, this is a great, cheap solution imho.
If you do contracting with the government, and have to follow some of the subsections of Sarbains Oxley, if you have data that comes in on physical media in a digital format, you have to be able to audit for that data and keep the data in storage, sometimes for years.
This is the government/legal system at work. If you were to lose the CD's and an audit was done and you did not have them, you can face massive legal fines.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
That is why it is imperative to keep the original CD.
Self Preservation.