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?

Bookshelf or spools?

[by Anonymous Coward]

How about a bookshelf, or some of the spools that new CDs come in? I would think you could buy those in bulk somewhere.

Re:Bookshelf or spools?

[The Great Pretender (975978)]

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.

Re:

[tylernt (581794)]

archive the images of the CD/DVD's on a harddrive ... find a third party managed storage space off-site for bulk storage of the disks

I agree. Of course, 30,000 CDs would consume over 18 terabytes, but most of them are probably not filled with 650MB of data. Plus there are a myriad of compression tools such as PK/WinZip and GZip that will decrease the storage requirements further. With high-density IDE and SATA disks and PCI or software RAID being so cheap these days, it should not be hard to build an inexpe

Re:

[couchslug (175151)]

There are plenty of good commercial solutions to storing such items. Automated rotary and sliding shelving systems are available where you may manually or electronically select the item you want. Bookshelf systems are available (we use them for USAF Tech Order binders) so if you want to store binders of DVDs it's no problem. They are robust enough for industrial tool cribs, and specc'ing an enclosure or fireproof room if required is routine (though expensive).
If your facility has the room, 20 or 40-foot ISO

Re:

[itwerx (165526)]

Parent is correct.

Also, Google is your friend:
      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=media+cab inet+%22data+center%22&btnG=Search [google.com]

(Need the phrase "data center" in there or you'll get a zillion home entertainment centers instead!)

Re:Bookshelf or spools?

[jthill (303417)]

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.

Interns and Cake Containers

[daeg (828071)]

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.

Re:Interns and Cake Containers

[edmudama (155475)]

Remember, interns are cheaper than actual solutions. That's actually a very good point. If I had mod points it'd be +1 insightful.

Re:Interns and Cake Containers

[CodemasterMM (943136)]

Hey, I'm an intern currently!

Wait... I've been making labels for the past two weeks.
Crap, he's right.

Re:Interns and Cake Containers

[twistedsymphony (956982)]

Use the above mentioned CD labeling system.
Place CD's in 208/300 CD/DVD binder.
Get shelving that will fit the Binders (Ikea IVAR works great for adjustments)

FTFA:

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.

Sounds like that's about what they currently do and it's not working out for them.

Re:

[daeg (828071)]

That's why I suggested cake containers instead of binders. Binders are great for when you use CDs or DVDs frequently, e.g., music or movies that you would like quick access to and when reading the face of a CD/DVD is useful. However, if you simply label CDs sequentially and never (rarely) need access, you can stack them a few hundred to a case. Label them in series chronologically. When you need to make space on your shelves, simply follow FIFO -- reduce from the lowest sequence up.

Binders waste a lot of sp

How much space do they have?

[PFI_Optix (936301)]

That's the big question. That, and how organized does this need to be? I can think of a couple of surprisingly simple solutions that are easy to keep organized, but it's hard to make recommendations without knowing exactly what they have to work with.

Jukebox or Disc Changer

[HoosierPeschke (887362)]

I can't image there isn't some system like this on a larger scale. If not, I'm sure it could be easily designed. The system would take up more room and require more maintenance that a CD case.

"Keep the original CD" = silly requirement

[xxxJonBoyxxx (565205)]

"Keep the original CD" sounds like a silly requirement. Why not just upload the contents of the CD to a file server, do a SHA1 hash of the original filesystem on both the CD and the file server, replicate the fuck out of the file server and toss the CD?

I'd bet you could ROI the "don't keep the original CDs" plan to under a year.

Re:"Keep the original CD" = silly requirement

[by Anonymous Coward]

"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 :)

Re:

[rednuhter (516649)]

its not their choice "they are required to retain the original media for several months", although whether or not thats a legal requirment it does not say.

If media = "digital" media, toss the damn CD

[xxxJonBoyxxx (565205)]

If everyone agrees on a cryptographic hash, modern technology (and law) often let you toss the physical media as long as you can prove you haven't changed the digital contents. (This is where the concepts of "integrity checks" and "non-repudidation" come in.)

We do this every day with checks, payroll sheets, purchase orders, receipts and all kinds of other tidbits that used to have to have a physical component, but we (and our various industries) got smarter.

Re:"Keep the original CD" = silly requirement

[Buzz_Litebeer (539463)]

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.

Re:"Keep the original CD" = silly requirement

[paro12 (142901)]

"Keep the original CD" sounds like a silly requirement

Keeping the Original CD is the ONLY way to prove what was actually submitted to the company in the first place. If you simply upload the information to a server, how do you prove that document X wasn't actually on the original CD two years into the project, when the projects been shot to hell and the lawyers are called in?

That is why it is imperative to keep the original CD.
Self Preservation.

Paper boxes?

[kosmosik (654958)]

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.

Re:

[walt-sjc (145127)]

Exactly. A simple box like this one [buyonlinenow.com] where you use standard paper sleeves with the disks. Label each sleeve with a sequential serial number, and enter the info into a database. If you have multiple different retention periods, you have several boxes going at once - one for each period.

Put the range of disk numbers on the front of the box.

If you want to get fancy, use a prefix that indicates the retention period (6m-123 is not the same as 6y-123)

CD Hook-on Files

[neonprimetime (528653)]

CD Hook-on Files like these [connectworld.net] work well. I've seen them used, for example, and cd / video exchange stores, etc.

Re:

[grapeape (137008)]

Sorry but when your storage cost is 5-6x the cost of the media something is definately wrong. Neat idea but way way overpriced for a piece of plastic and some cardboard sleeves.

Imation Disc Stakka

[Fbelch (9658)]

Maybe something like this might be what you are looking for....

http://www.imation.com/products/disc_stakka/index. html [imation.com]

- 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.

Re:

[Masami Eiri (617825)]

We use these at my office. Wonderful little toys. We've only got 2 in use, but damn if they don't make access easy. If they weren't $90-$100, I'd be tempted to pick up 1.. or 5... for myself at home. (I've got alot of DVDs)

Re:

[Bastardchyld (889185)]

This solution is not needed first of all in order to support 30,000 cds you would have to have 300 units broke up into towers of 5 that is 60 towers. Where would that go? Besides at a price (newegg) of $115 each that is $34,500.00. That is insane. The only way you could justify spending that much money on this is if it was not going to be a nightmare to install (i.e. single box). Besides the fact that you would still have to buy powered usb hubs to power all of these bus powered devices. This may be a

Re:Imation Disc Stakka

[Sparr0 (451780)]

http://dansdata.com/quickshot005.htm [dansdata.com]

Holds 50% more discs for 25% less price.

I had the DC-101, it was awesome. The 300 is supposed to be superior in every way.

Contact a company that does this for a living

[Eric^2 (33085)]

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 [buildingdesign.co.uk] 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.

Re:

[Red Flayer (890720)]

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.

If she wanted a solution from Clippy, she would have used MSOffice Help.

Here's the real solution to your requirements...

[Optic7 (688717)]

There was a story here on slashdot a few months ago about an alternative to jewel cases, where people discussed all kinds of options for CD/DVD storage. I found this particular comment to be the most useful for really large scale CD/DVD storage. It seems simple, effective, and practical. Also check the other comments on that story for other ideas, but I think this is really the best solution for you based on what you said:

Large quantity CD/DVD storage solution [slashdot.org]

Read no further

[CXI (46706)]

The above linked post from the previous discussion is the best answer. Design your system for reuse of the CD sleeves to save money (assign a sleeves number separate from the project/owner/etc number). Keep the sleeves when you destroy the media at the end of the project. When new media arrives, log the room, cabinet and drawer you put it in. The sleeves only need to be sequential in the drawers, so you could have sleeves 1, 2 and 3 all in different cabinets. It doesn't matter, your database tells you where

White folder boxes

[jnaujok (804613)]

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.

Storage solutions

[iotashan (761097)]

Did any of you even read the article? They need to store the physical media, after it has already been archived to another data storage system.

I'd check out any of the big-boys that deal with large-scale, physical storage.

The one company I can think of off the top of my head is Spacesaver. If you've ever seen a hospital's records storage system, it was probably a Spacesaver unit.

They even claim CD/DVD support:
http://www.spacesaver.com/appl_cat.asp?cat_id=4 [spacesaver.com]

Any additional time spent is time wasted...

[stienman (51024)]

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 [supermediastore.com]

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

FIFO is key

[0xABADC0DA (867955)]

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.

Store only?

[slim (1652)]

In my local Ikea, I noticed that the very top warehouse shelf is stacked not with furniture, but with huge boxes of till rolls. I believe it's a legal requirement to keep till rolls for a certain amount of time (for auditability), but the truth is that it's very unlikely that anyone will ever ask to look at them, so they're stored in an efficient to store, inefficient to retrieve method just in case, and once the archive period is over for the whole box, they're pulped.

It sounds like you've got a similar re

Dated spools?

[Mostly a lurker (634878)]

I am assuming that it a requirement from the customer that you must retain the physical media. I am also assuming that the media arrive with labels that identify what they are, and that it is quite acceptable to search through 100-200 discs on the rare occasions when they are needed. The important thing is to know which batch to look at.

My solution to that would be to use the 100 disc spools that are often used to package blanks. Slap a date range on the top or side of each and store them in sequence.

An idea using stuff around the office

[PFI_Optix (936301)]

Filing cabinets, empty paper boxes, and CD envelopes.

Yes, filing cabinets. The kind made for hanging folders. I've got one drawer at home full of CDs. Several hundred, in fact.

Put the CDs in paper envelopes and stack them into the lid from a 10-ream box of paper. I think one box lid will hold around 500 CDs in this manner; I've never tried to fill one up this way so actual results may vary. Stack two filled box lids into a drawer. 10 four-drawer cabinets should be sufficient for storage, and help you keep o

Scan 'Em

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

I got a $1000 200 CD-ROM jukebox with FireWire. A patched mtx on Linux will expose its control/transfer API, so I wrote a Perl program to extract with cdparanoia, lookup its metadata in FreeDB, and advance discs. The cheap jukebox offered only 2-3x read in DAE mode, so 200 CDs took about 90h, or 3 days. Including 30s per CD to strip the plastic jewelcases, load, then unload into big CD books, which I didn't want to spend two hours twice a week, it took about about 2 months to scan 3000 CDs, including a few

2 things

[Klaidas (981300)]

A warehouse
Lots and lots of shelves.

Well what we used to do.

[LWATCDR (28044)]

Back in the day my company used to convert a lot of data for customers converting to our software.
As a service we used to keep the conversion just in case they had a crash and didn't have a backup.
This was when a one gig hard drive was every expensive so we used floppies.
We made shelves out of old floppy disk boxes and gave each floppy a number. In the customer record we entered the self number, the box number, and the disk number. Don't worry this wasn't any type of personal data. And the customers didn't

Professional Archive cabinets

[oneiros27 (46144)]

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:

      http://www.russbassett.com/products/cabinets_disc. cfm [russbassett.com]
      http://www.can-am.ca/cdvideo1.htm [can-am.ca]

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.htm [systems-supply.com]
      http://www.russbassett.com/media/products_disc.cfm [russbassett.com]

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.

Netflix

[camusflage (65105)]

Netflix already has done this, I'm sure. Dig around, find out how they run their distribution centers, and copy their work. No use reinventing the wheel when someone else already built a business model around keeping track of a crapload of discs.

I have that at home

[aminorex (141494)]

I have two bookshelves, roughly 800x2200x200cm, with 50x spindles of optical disks in 5 shelves with 10 stacks of 3 spindles on each shelf. I think the bookshelves were $25 each. I dedicate specific shelves to specific topics, and usually leave 10 or so available slots on each spindle, so it is easy to maintain alphabetic order within a topic.
 

Re:

[Control Group (105494)]

*blink*

You have these at home? And they only cost $25 apiece?

Where did you find the space for a bookshelf that's roughly as long as a seven-storey building is tall? And where did you buy them (or the materials for them)? I don't have the room in my apartment for a twenty-two meter bookshelf, but if the price scales down appropriately, I want in.

eMule

[DrXym (126579)]

Use eMule or another P2P network. Lots of users would love to archive your customer data for you.

A company called SSI has exactly what you need...

[ameline (771895)]

A company called SSI has exactly what you need.

See: http://www.ssiworld.com/products/products3-en.htm [ssiworld.com]

They even have impressive videos of their products in action. They can handle almost any input format you can imagine. CDs, DVDs -- they'll even handle Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs.

400,000 CD storage facility

[tomlouie (264519)]

> ... as many as 30,000 CDs and DVDs on hand ...

Pththth, amateurs. These guys are storing almost 400,000 AOL cds [nomoreaolcds.com]

Re:

[denisbergeron (197036)]

RTFS Doesn't work they have to keep the original !

Re:

[cyber0ne (640846)]

Ya, you can do that in pretty much any OS. But it doesn't exactly address the problem of what to do with the media that they're required to retain, does it?