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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?
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.
Maybe something like this might be what you are looking for....
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http://www.imation.com/products/disc_stakka/index
- Stack units up to five high to create a tower that holds up to 500 discs without any extra cabling or rebooting your computer.
- Connect towers using powered USB hubs to control over 100 towers (that's over 50,000 discs) from a single computer.
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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Large quantity CD/DVD storage solution
"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
Maybe this is a bit too low-tech for slashdot, but when cleaning up stacks of empty cd cases, I found that the small white "document storage boxes" that you can get at any office supply store perfectly fit six stacks of CDs in their cases. Just stack the disks into the box, mark them with a "keep until" date and when that rolls around, just toss the whole thing (the boxes only cost about $0.50 each.) Keeps it clean, reduces the time to pull them out of the case, and if you need to recover one, just pull the box that falls into the date range and search that box. Each box holds about 500 discs, so you'd be talking about 60 boxes, which means a decent size file room will store them all.
It's cheap and easy. But probably way too low tech for the slashdot crowd.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
How do you scan them in now? Do you put them in an automatic machine, do you have humans sitting there doing the work, etc?
However they come out of the scanning process should direct how to store them.
If you've got humans doing the work then put them back in the jewel case, and drop the case into a filing box that you can store on shelving. Mark that box with a large barcoded sticker. Every week scan all the boxes, and have the system beep when you scan a box due for disposal. Dump the contents into the secure shed bin, and put the box on the pile of empties for new projects.
If you do the scanning automatically,a nd simply have a human de-casing the disc and putting them on a spindle or stack, then buy spindle carriers that can pick up the spindle or stack on the output side and drop the entire thing into a suitably sized box, then do the same as above. (I'd probably go this route anyway rather than the storage in jewel case and big box above).
Look for "cake boxes" that are really spindle CD/DVD boxes, such as the following: cake boxes
Are the CDs/DVDs in small batches or big batches? ie, do you have to store 5 of them together, or 500 together? Is there a great variance (do you accept both customers that give 5 and customers that give 500?).
If you want to spend tens of thousands of dollers then a good engineering firm can design a system that you just feed discs into. It'll then scan them for you, store them, and on regular intervals shred those that have been authorized for shredding. Should take up the space of a large closet or small cubicle for a storage capacity of 5,000 or so discs, and scanning capacity of a few hundred per hour.
-Adam
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.
Lots of companies make cabinets for large scale archiving for data centers and the like. They don't tend to be cheap, but they can pack them rather densely:
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http://www.russbassett.com/products/cabinets_disc
http://www.can-am.ca/cdvideo1.htm
There are also moving shelf options, but they normally are for mixed media (tapes, cds, etc), and you have to buy the shelves, then fill it with media packs to hold the type of media you're storing:
http://www.systems-supply.com/nms2k/edpstorage.ht
http://www.russbassett.com/media/products_disc.cf
If you're going for cheap and densely packed, I'd probably re-sleeve them and drop them into a drawered cabinet, but you'll need to make sure they're well organized if you expect to ever find them again.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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
Coming from an environment that is required to retain client data for up to 7 years, it strikes me that a simple book-shelf is terrible. Surely the CD/DVD's should be in a fire/earthquake/flood proof container? I would have to ask what the liability of the original posters referenced firm is should they have disasterous loss. The original poster makes reference to a steel draw, suggesting that fire proofing is required. Assuming that the original CD's need to be retained the best method that I could think of would be to archive the images of the CD/DVD's on a harddrive for ease of use and then find a third party managed storage space off-site for bulk storage of the disks. Once a week, or month, do a store/purge cycle. The liability for the hard copies then falls under managment of the third parties facility and their iinsurance.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Oh, come off it. 50 per spindle. 20 spindles per thousand. 600 spindles. 20 spindles per shelf. 30 shelves. Three bookcases total. Catalog by spindle number and date added + uniqueifier. Sharpie both on the disc. Done.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
That is why it is imperative to keep the original CD.
Self Preservation.