safe & compact storage of discs
 

what are the best brands types of DVD storage cases to use? I don't have a safety deposit box at a bank or fire safe right now, am having to store my discs at my friends office under a desk, where the space is limited, I work at home so I needed an off site storage place. I have read about CD wallets warping, but given the limited space my friend has under their desk at work, discs in individual cases would take up space quickly, I have alot of material to archive, which will be on many discs. Does anyone have any ideas or know of alternatives?

The summer crash wiped out the original reply. Re-writing it...

The archival storage, you need only two considerations:
(1) flat without pressure,
(2) darkness without moisture/humidity.

For me, that's a drawer in an office file cabinet, in spindles.

Spindles rest discs on their nature hub, keeping discs flat and not subjecting it to pressures that may warp, like wallets and cheaply-made cases. The interior room-temperature atmosphere is fine for the discs, and silica gel packets in between the spindles help keep moisture out of the drawer. The discs are not harmed by light. Because you're not likely to use these discs much, there is no consideration for wear-and-tear, removing discs from spindles (and potentially dropping them while handling).

A small metal or plastic box, with several spindles inside, and some silica gel packets, would be perfectly fine. I would avoid cardboard, as it attracts moisture, and it provides no water-damage protection, being on the floor. Moisture leeches upwards from the floor.

If that won't work, let me know why, and I can attempt further suggestions.

I have read in multiple articles that say discs should be stored vertically, not horizontally, right now I have committed to a system of storing data DVDs using tyvek sleeves stored vertically in a disc file system, I burn my jpg photos, mpg movie clips with corresponding thm files onto Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs discs. I use image burn to burn this data. I went ahead with this system for now, as I did not get a reply to this question for awhile & fires were threatening my area so I needed to get my data backed up & off site fairly quickly, did not have time to wait for a reply.

A neighbor uses online back up, this seems like an easy way to go, just back up all my data online, this would give me my offsite storage, instead of incremental manual back up to discs, or are discs better?

Those articles sound like they were written by "media fossils", that is to say people who have been around media for many years. However, they are confusing their tapes with their discs.

There were conflicting preferences as to whether tapes should be stored on the side, or flat. It was an argument over gravity, combined with the tape innards potentially shifting around. There really was not "proper" way -- gravity affected the tapes regardless of storage orientation.

Discs have no such parts. Discs must be stored flat to sit in proper spindles. The only way to store a disc vertically is to lay a spindle sideways, or to place inside a case.

• The sideways spindle will potentially "rattle" discs back and forth, if the spindle is not full or completely stabilized. The way to stabilize it is to cushion it. However, many times the cushion will cause undue stress on the discs.
• The cases may or may not stress the hub, which could lead to warping of a disc, or damage to the hub (which in turn could damage the inner part of a disc -- an irreparable damage on dye-based or phase-change media).

So I don't know what sort of non-sense logic those folks are trying to follow.

Your method of burning data to Taiyo Yuden media is one decent option. The other would be the terabyte-sized hard drives, external USB2 or Firewire.

With the amount of data I have to store, an online storage method would take forever minus a day to upload. It's already slow enough to copy to the external drive (hours and hours) -- online transfer would easily take days/weeks to perform such a large transfer of data. Online backup isn't even an option on the SAN at my office, because the gigabit ethernet is still too slow compared to direct-to-computer transfers.

If you have e-SATA external connectivity capabilities, that would transfer even faster than USB2 or Firewire.

If you are happy with your current TY-disc method, I would at very least suggest trading in the Tyvek for plain paper sleeves. The plastic-to-plastic contact is not good for a disc. Paper does not "stick" to a disc like Tyvek and other materials tend to do over time.