How and where do you store your stuff?

[ozymango]

Greetings, fellow babies. Things are quiet on the home front at the moment so I thought I'd throw this out there, as I sit here watching hard drives backup ... the little blinky lights are so mesmerizing ...

Anyway that got me thinking about how much things have changed since I first started reading at Videohelp -- way back when, I discovered an interesting thing called a "video CD" from an international friend (i.e. a friend who came from a country where they had video CDs of movies I'd never even heard of), I was trying to figure out how to watch one (loaned to me by my friend) on my own computer, I somehow found "Videohelp," and thus it all began ...

Flash forward twenty years or so and while I still have some stuff on DVD (which I haven't actually put in a DVD player in years), pretty much all my favorite flicks are in one of two formats: Digital files (mp4, avchd, avi, mkv, xvid, etc) on some hard drive somewhere, or, ironically, 8mm/S8mm film, all those old home movies from years ago that I will never ever ever get rid of even if I've copied them to digital, because the physical films are precious to me.

I've got stacks of DVDs where I've "archived" stuff over the years, which I've now re-archived, I guess, to other media (spinner and SSD drives, for the sake of convenience), and I'm way past the point of trying to "organize" storing old films, old tapes (hey I've still got Beta tapes), CDs, DVDs, a few dozen hard drives I've backed up of other hard drives I've backed up -- I know I've got copies of everything, though I'll be darned if I can actually find any particular title at any given moment.

It's a paradox of riches -- I've got more ways of saving stuff than ever before, but with all the ways of saving stuff I'm now saving EVERYTHING just on the off chance I'll need or want it again someday ...

So -- how do you manage it? Do you manage it? How systematic are your backups? I have a friend who actually tosses old video tapes after he archives them to digital, but I just can't bring myself to do that. Do you still save all your old DVDs? Do you even watch DVDs any more?

Just wondering. Ah, my backup just stopped, it can't find a file. Boy do I know that feeling...

[johnmeyer]

I have space, so I save all the original formats. I do this because, even with tape, better ways are always found to transfer and improve them. Most of the older analog formats don't degrade much, although there are exceptions.

As for organizing, I put everything on bare drives which I mount in drawers in my computer tower. To keep track, I use WhereIsIt, a wonderful cataloging program.