I can't find a good forum for this.
How do you store a large amount of media?
*Media shelves are overflowing, but with an adhesive reading light, dividers and different shelves, it's quite easy to find what you're looking for
*I have a 200 disc cylinder with plastic divider tabs and index markers to show where you took a disc out. It's really hard to read the marker label on a disc as you peer down between tightly spaced discs. I can usually only read the top of the disc and then it has to be right side up. I also find Lightscribe very hard to read in dim light because of the low contrast. For this reason, ideally I'd like black lettering on white inkjet printable discs with a copy of the title also upside down so I can always read the disc.
*Thin jewel cases are too thin to read a label on the spine. I have to use thick jewel cases but they also take a lot of space. It's also a lot of work preparing a large amount of cases. I haven't tried DVD style tall cases yet.
*I've wound up putting the discs back in spindles. Same problem when they are upside down, and you have to hold 40 discs in your fingers while pulling out the discs one by one. Boxes bigger than 50 are hard to use for this purpose.
*I think a disc carosel would be the best design, with enough room to completely expose the surface. It should hold quite a bit. I mean a rotary one. There's also the box kind like a mini file cabinet. You need to leave a lot of room to flip the discs.
*I just got another idea. Why not label disc sleeves instead? And include some serial number in marker on the disc to match with the sleeve, to ensure they don't get mixed up. I really have to mark all discs or I won't know what they are.
*Put everytihng on a NAS. I bought an ITX, Atom barebones computer for this. I got up to 50MB/s over Gb ethernet. I found off the shelf NAS are far too slow for me. I need to move a large amount of data. I just used Ubuntu and shared out the disc with Samba. There's also FreeNAS and some other ones, that do the other standards like iPod and home a/v(?) that meda players read. I had this working great with custom firmware and a wireless G stick on WDTV original version. Now the WDTV+ officially supports this.
I still don't trust backups on harddrive, even RAID (I've actually lost a RAID the first time I tried it, long story), so I need discs.
*There's a program to use DV tape in a computer mode to backup file data with your camcorder.
*I made my own program to store data as video on VHS tape
In theory I could probably get 4GB out of it, hardly worthwhile.
*I'd love to get a Bluray burner too. I have to many discs.
So, I reduce the number of discs, and try to use better organizing methods.
