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Data Storage

How Do You Store Your Media? 75

Posted by Cliff from the digging-out-from-under-the-avalanche dept.
somaamos asks: "Face it, you people have thousands of media items: VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, miniDVs... where are you storing it all? I've been looking for a good storage solution which fits in with normal home furnishings -- something with high storage density, looks nice, consumes little wall space, and makes the media easy to find. Most cabinets and shelving consume lots of wall space and would store only a tenth of my media. The closest thing I've found is from CAN-AM but I'm not sure the metal finish would be suitable for my living room. I don't like the price either, but at this point that is a smaller concern. Any genius ideas out there for this one?"
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How Do You Store Your Media? More

How Do You Store Your Media?

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  • Don't buy one of those Ikea all wood living room cupboards that claim to have space for everything. They don't.

    Get yourself an attractive metal rack that is sturdy enough to hold all your electronic equipment. Make sure that only the legs rest on the floor so that you have some room underneath the bottom rack to stick other stuff.

    Then get some cafe curtains and cardboard boxes and throw anything that you want to keep but don't want to see out in the open in the cardboard boxes and slide the boxes under
  • How do you store these things so that your 2-year old doesn't break them? She's already wiped out 2 DVD drives, broken a DVD, broken at least one VHS tape, and scratched too many CDs to count... and of course, anything she sees her daddy playing with, she wants to play with herself! (And she's now smart enough to find the keys and use them to unlock cabinets.)
    • >How do you store these things so that your 2-year old doesn't break them?

      Easy. 7-Foot tall cabinet with doors. TV inside about half way up, strapped in with earthquake straps (this is in CalEEForneeeea). Then the video and DVD stuff is above, not below, the TV. This at least extends the window out a few more years, when she'll be able to drag grownup size chairs around.

    • I've had a fair amount of success with an electric fence...
      • Is the mod crew asleep? I can't believe this did not get modded as funny!

        First time my two year old killed the VCR I took the case off and gave her a screwdriver and pliars. Then I plugged it back in!

        Alright, so its not very funny, so what? It's late!
    • The word 'no' and a smack to the hand has worked wonders on my 2 year old son.
    • Perhaps a little discussion about personal property.

      For example net time she breaks something, break her favorite toy. She'll learn right quick.
      • Perhaps a little discussion about personal property. For example net time she breaks something, break her favorite toy. She'll learn right quick.

        Troll, you'd be teaching that a) breaking things is acceptable, b) hurting people that you love is acceptable, and c) your emotional development ceased at around the three or four year-old level, except that two year-olds don't hate and don't hurt on purpose.

        Note that a two year-old is not capable of handling a DVD without scratching it, nor understanding thi

    • I have a whole lot of experience with this one!

      Here's what I did:

      1. realize that you can't have nice things when you've got a two year old, they'll get smeared with peanut butter and cheerios and milk
      2. once you've handled that decision, go to ikea
      3. buy STEN - the crappy, unfinished, unsanded and dirt cheap shelving
      4. install as wraparound on all walls of the living space - we used the 6' uprights and the deep/wide shelves
      5. bolt to the walls at both the top and bottom
      6. put one shelf at the very bottom and then the

    • You're thinking about it backwards, protecting things from two-year-olds is basically impossible. Instead,try this: Vari Kennel [drsfostersmith.com] These are great: tough, reliable, fairly cheap, widely available, and come in different sizes.

    • Follow these easy steps:
      1. Locate your hand.
      2. Apply it to toddling ass.
      3. Repeat as necessary.
      It's a whole lot cheaper than baby-proofing everything, and the rugrats get a basic understanding of personal property and boundary control.

  • 300GB (Score:1)

    by BhAaD ( 692949 )
    300GB Maxtor HDD [slashdot.org]
  • If possible, get big bulky degrading stuff like VHS tapes onto SVCD or DVD. Discs are pretty easy to store. You just have to do away with nonsense like jewel cases and DVD cases. They're bulky and take lots of space. Take the liner notes out of the CD's and put the discs in a cd binder [amazon.com]. You can fit several hundred CD's with the notes in a very small amount of shelf space. The only downside is having to realphabetize occassionally as the collection expands, so leave some blank space at the end of each
    • "If possible, get big bulky degrading stuff like VHS tapes onto SVCD or DVD. "

      You have a point. Something to consider, though, is that the video has to be compressed to fit on DVD or SVCD. In a lot of cases, that's perfectly okay. However, higher quality is sometimes needed. I'd recommend just using plain old digital tapes. Heck, if somebody'd make a little vacuum box for them, seems like that'd be the easiest way to deal with the archival issue.

      MiniDV is easier to handle and more durable than DVDs,
    • For truly large (and changing) CD collections, to me the only way to go is sleeves [casedirect.com]. I've been using these things for many years now... I own around 900 CDs, and they all fit in a small space in my closet inside sleeves inside plastic containers, including liner notes.
    • Take the liner notes out of the CD's and put the discs in a cd binder ... The only downside is having to realphabetize occassionally as the collection expands

      Even better. Get CD binder pages [staples.com] and put them in an ordinary 3-ring binder. This way, you can insert new pages as your collection grows. This is much more convenient than leaving blank pages in the middle or reshuffling them all as you get new stuff.

  • large hard drives- you simply can't beat the accesibility they can offer and you can fit an increasingly large amount of data on one box the size of a novel.
  • Find a few independent cabinet makers in the area, and find out how much they'll charge to make you some custom cabinets...that don't look like cabinets.

    Of course, you'll be paying through the nose.

    Alternately, buy the CAN-AM stuff, then screw wood faces on the front if you want to make it look different, or paint it, or otherwise customize it.

    If you were the handyman you so desperately ought to be, you wouldn't have even asked. However, building simple, nice shelving with doors or drawers is not
    • stienman, have you actually DONE this with our cabinets, or know someone that has? I'd be interested to see the results! John @ Can-Am
      • stienman, have you actually DONE this with our cabinets, or know someone that has? I'd be interested to see the results! John @ Can-Am

        No, but if you want to send me a unit then I'll do so and send you pictures. Cherry would look nice...

        -Adam
        • :) Nice try though. You promise to do that and send pics, i'll certainly give you a discount! John @ Can-Am
          • I wouldn't be able to pay for more than the cost of shipping. But at the rate my kids are destroying tapes, I doubt I'll have need of one in a few years. :-)

            -Adam
            • I'm lucky, mine are drawn to the cases, they have destroyed ALL VHS cases I have. I guess they are drawn to the pretty colors :D Only buy DVDs now anyway, so that issue is pretty much moot.

  • Face it, you people have thousands of media items: VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, miniDVs

    No, I haven't. Facing the same problem, a quick analysis showed that everything I archived could be faster be restored by downloading it from the net than by finding the relevant backup medium, with the exception of my DSL password and my private key (I hope). Hence I have only one business-card sized CD that I carry with me.

    It takes a strong character however to admit that even most of your toy coding projects can easily be

    • The question is if your post should have been moderated insightful or funny, i vote for both =D
    • OK, *snaps fingers*, get me "Fight Club", or "A Clockwork Orange", or "Cake - Fashion Nugget".

      It is much faster for me to lean over and grab a dvd or cd out of my cabinet, than it is for you to download a crappy rip which may or may not run on my particular os/hardware because of crummy codec issues.

      Now, granted, you said "everything I archived", and I too could fit my home directory and useful other crap on a business card cd (or on my 20gb mp3 player / usb hd), but you're not really answering the dudes
  • ... but I rotate hard drives. I buy a new HD every year/year and a half. I rotate the data through there, usually with some redundancy. I don't really advise this to anybody else. I put the really really uber important stuff on CD/DVD, and I have a firewire drive I turn on once a month and do a backup to.

    I'm not advocating that people put all their data on HDs and that's it, but I woulud mention that it's always good to prioritize what's really important. Being a packrat isn't advised.
  • I use storage racks made by Boltz [boltz.com]. They're sturdy, attractive (to my eye) and efficient. They are a little costly, but significantly less so than the 1100+ CDs they contain. They're also really responsive to the needs their customers (one of my friends called them and told them the TV stand he bought was a little small for his TV and was flexing a little and within a month they had a larger sturdier one on the market and replaced his old one for free!)
  • Unless you plan on showcasing your collection(s), consider adopting a closet in your room with the most media already in it to suit this task. My bedroom closet, aside from storing my hanging shirts, also has racks upon racks upon racks of CDs and DVDs. It works for me. All of those stacks of manuals and [plug type='shameless'] O'Reilly books also reside there.

    The storage units themselves weren't a kit. Nothing beats a table saw, a good mouse sander, and a trip to Home Depot. Or Lowes. Or something. Just s
  • InterMetro (or similar) wire shelving ( http://www.containerstore.com/browse/index.jhtml?C ATID=13370 ) White cardboard & metal boxes from IKEA CaseLogic ProSleeves (or similar) the media go into the sleeves, which go into the boxes (alphabetized by title for video, artist for audio) which go onto the shelves...
  • The place where I keep most of my CDs... The floor of my car. Some loose, some in a binder, the store-bought ones in their case. All the latest ones, and the newer mixes that I've burned all go into a pile above my sun-visor. Yah, some have some pretty fierce scratches, but it's a handy place to keep them. My wife doesn't like it when I pull a sharp left -occasionally a few break loose and fall into her lap startling her..
    • I don't have any original CDs in my car; I make copies to CD-R and use those. That way, they can get scratched, damaged or even stolen and I don't really care, I just make another copy. It's also easier to store a bundle of loose CDs than bulky cases in the car.

  • first off, i could swear we've discussed this before, but i'm too tired/lazy to dig up the url.

    anyway, go to used office furniture stores. you'd be surprised what you can find. i found a used fireproof case, meant for 8.5" x 5.5" inch cards, like deeds, that works PERFECT for cd cases. it fits 4 across, about 75 deep, and has 5 drawers. of course, it weighs about 1200 lbs., being insulated beeyond helief, and it's not fine for the living room, but for $200 it was a bargain.

    on the other side of things, i f

    • Nice idea, but beware, media is more sensitive to fire than paper, thus a "firesafe" is not a good place for media in the event of a fire. You need a "mediasafe" if you want to keep media through a fire. Paper is not damaged by steam, so most "firesafes" work by having a lining with a lot of water trapped inside, when the safe gets hot that water boils, taking the energy of the fire with it.

      Even if you have the right safe, they are only rated for a short time, so if you live in an area where the fire d


      • i didn't make myself clear enough. it's old, and insulated with about 1000 lbs. of asbestos. (eeek!)
        this sucker IS capable of surviving whatever. i didn't really buy it for the fireproofness, but it's a nice bonus. the cd's fitting in perfect was the bigger selling point. that, and the really butter-smooth rolling actions of the drawers.

        and since the stuff isn't being disturbed, i'm not worried about abestosis.
        • You only need to worry about airborne asbestos. I don't know how many schools that are still around that have asbestos celing tiles in their science labs. You remeber the lab celings, right? Those crazy looking hard tiles with all the holes you used to count during class? Yep. Asbestos.

          BTW, I think they averaged about 80 some holes per tile. (yes, i was that kid who actually had a reasonable guess as to the number of holes in the celing)

          • since i'm not taking off the case, scrubbing the asbestos into flaky little lung choking bits, and putting the case back on, i sleep well at night. ;)

            seriously, there's no movement against any bits of asbestos- it's lined with steel internally too.
            the amount of money wasted on asbestos removal... sigh. yet another example of the economy-sapping powers of mathematical stupidity.
    • ...found a nice elm mail sorting unit...

      I prefer Pine for my email!

  • I've a few backup CDs of my $HOME which I store on a regular CD spindel(?) since I don't look thru them anyway. My old Amiga flkoppy disks are in regular paperboxes which works great and my DVDs are in a file/binder/whatever-the-english-word-for-swedish- parm-is containing plastic sheets which can hold 6 DVDs each. the alternative would be to get lots of DVD cases and print out covers but it would use so much space so I prefer this solution.
    • and my DVDs are in a file/binder/whatever-the-english-word-for-swedish- parm-is containing plastic sheets which can hold 6 DVDs each.
      Yep, sounds like a binder (with those plastic CD sheets).
  • But it really is a great simple product! (I'm not just the owner, I'm a user :).

    For any CD storage system (sleeves, jewel cases, whatever), tabbed plastic dividers come in pretty handy when you need to organize hundreds or thousands of CDs: http://discdividers.com [discdividers.com]
  • dromme cabinet from ikea, holds 882 cds, 306 dvds, or 153 videos. costs CA$150 , black&white lacquered.
  • I recently expanded upwards by purchasing a number of small CD and DVD towers that I placed on top of my wall units and TV cabinets. I also have a pair of free-standing towers, one just for VHS tapes the other configurable to cope with VHS, DVD, CD, paperbacks, NES carts and Gameboy boxes. I also use "brick and plank" storage for books and magazines. Having just purchased an old collection of 10 or so years of Apple Mac magazines, they have become my most immediate storage problem.

    Other than that, the st

  • When I store my cd's I use a geometrically arranged pattern of stacking, generally refered to as a 'pile'. Around my desk there are several piles of cd's that seems to merge with the cheetos and empty soda cans into a single big pile. Moving on to my living room, there is another 'pile' of DVD's on my TV and on my DVD player. It really is a versatile solution. It expands easily, finding what you want is easier than it looks as you can create a seperate pile for your most needed/used items. It works for
  • Drill some holes in the wall. Put some shelves up. There's a hell of a lot more space at 4ft about floor level.

  • IKEA (Score:2)

    by bhima ( 46039 )
    If IKEA doesn't make some sort of storage system for it, I don't want whatever it is!

    Honestly though, mounting ISO images of CDs commonly used at work is surpassed in usefulness only by my boot floppy image collection. Now if only I could rid myself of the floppy disk entirely!

    • How to make a multiboot cd in Linux:
      http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue85/sipos. html

      (Sorry, it's kind of a hack since he uses 1 DOS program, but hey it's free advice. :)

      --Alternative:
      http://www.newfreeware.com/utils /972/

      --Best of luck. :)
  • Cliff, you could of course just ask Can-Am directly :) We can get you a sample of the metal finish, and there are lots of people have it in their living room (me included!) We were featured in Home magazine recently you know. John

  • I've got too much crap. It's kind of upsetting to even think about how much stuff I've acquired over the years.

    With this in mind, I've given away all of my VHS tapes, permanantly loaned out my VCR, etc. I went out and bought an iPod, and started ripping all of my CD's and throwing out the jewel boxes. I also back up my data onto DVD+R's. Now I'm stuck with tons of CD-type media. I recommend getting a bunch of great big CD wallets [fellowes.com] that will fit nicely into just about any bookshelf. It might not be a

  • Geez (Score:1)

    by pmz ( 462998 )

    Doesn't everyone use an abandoned iron mine for this stuff? What rock did you hide under for the last decade?!?
  • I went beyond custom shelving. I did a beautiful built-in shelving. You have to use an interior wall, not exterior.

    1. Cut big hole in sheet rock-- for aesthetic reasons you probably should go about the same size as other windows, but bigger is ok-- it will look like a monster picture window on the interior wall. Oh yeah, do your best to make sure you don't have power and/or pipe problems. I had to re-route a power cable, but not too bad.
    2. Cut out some 2x4 framing, but probably not all. I left one in the

  • We wanted a cabinet for our stereo/tv setup and so we looked around for awhile before giving up and getting one custom made. Turned out very nice, and not hideously expensive. It's got the hole for the 32" tv, with two drawers underneath, 300 CDs per drawer (also holds VHS or DVD, and are deep enough for even the horrible disney cases). To the right of the TV is the component stack, and underneath that is cubbyhole for all the assorted junk that goes along with it like cables and headphones, album cleane
  • I have all my media (CD's, DVD's, Games that are on one of those two media) in the big flip books w/ zippers for easy access. I keep track of the CD's DVD's Games and Books [mediachest.com] I own using a website called Mediachest.com. I used to use DVD profiler but then I found Mediachest and switched because it offers the ability to keep track of everything you own, not just DVD's.
  • How Do You Store Your Media?

    Is that some sort of geek come-on?
  • My really, really important stuff is stored in a safe deposit box at a local bank. I have digital copies of treasured family photos. I will be adding DVDs converted from video tapes shortly. The plan is to keep original media relatively safe in the house, but to maintain an offsite archive in case anything happens to the house.

    Music CDs, movies, games, etc., really don't matter and can be insured in any case. I'm not torqued up about my kid gnawing on Tomb Raider or anything. I'm worried about stuff that I

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