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?

[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.

Interns and Cake Containers

[daeg]

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.

Jukebox or Disc Changer

[HoosierPeschke]

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]

"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.

Paper boxes?

[kosmosik]

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.

Contact a company that does this for a living

[eric2hill]

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:Interns and Cake Containers

[edmudama]

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:"Keep the original CD" = silly requirement

[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 :)

FIFO is key

[0xABADC0DA]

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.

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

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

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.

Netflix

[camusflage]

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.

Re:Imation Disc Stakka

[Bastardchyld]

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 great solution up to one tower, however any more than that and you are wasting your time.

Re:"Keep the original CD" = silly requirement

[Buzz_Litebeer]

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:Bookshelf or spools?

[jthill]

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.

Re:Dump the ISOs...

[Anonymous Coward]

dump the ISOs, and tell the lawyers that if they can tell the difference between an original digital file and a bit-identical duplicate, you'll find a storage system for all those CDs/DVDs.

the wonderful thing about digital documents is that they can be duplicated *exactly*; something that's not possible with real documents, which is what that particular bit of legalese that everybody's mouthing off about was written. since there's literally no difference, you're actually storing the original file. forcing your company to hang on to the original media is like requiring that a law firm keep all their paperwork in the original manila folders, and not allowing them to store those folders in file cabinets.

"legalese" is not an excuse for stupidity, and letting people use it that way just encourages bad law.

Re:Bookshelf or spools?

[tylernt]

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 inexpensive SAN. You're not going to need the performance of SCSI or Fiber Channel.

If your policy does not allow for outsourcing the physical disc storage (for privacy reasons etc), destroy the discs after you rip them to your storage array. Just be sure to back up that array offiste.

Re:"Keep the original CD" = silly requirement

[paro12]

"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.