Argh, the problem of physical media is raising it’s head again.
It’s been many years since I converted all of my CDs to MP3s and the boxes of discs still sit in the garage until we can decide what to do with them. Like a mate is doing I may just leave them there until it becomes some body else’s problem. There’s way too much sentimentality attached involved for me to be able to just turf them all. I was forced to buy a CD a couple of weeks ago, the first in years, as it was significantly cheaper to have it shipped from the UK than to buy it on iTunes. The first thing I did was rip it to my hard drive and now I’m left with a disc and packaging that I no longer want.
Rae and I love our movies and we don’t go out much (thank you lovely children) so we had invested quite a deal in our movie collection which was at last count over 450 DVDs. That was fine when we had space and watched movies on a dvd player but things have changed.
First off we changed our room around and removed all of the shelving. We can now fit in two lovely comfortable couches but there’s nowhere to store the discs. This isn’t so much of a problem though as we no longer have a standalone DVD player; we watch everything through a PC. Windows Media Centre allows us to play our music, view photos, listen to the radio (local and internet), record/watch television and have our movie collection all run through a dedicated media computer. For us it’s fantastic as television shows and movies live on a server that we can access them from anywhere in the house, but now we have 450 movies sitting in boxes next to the CDs.
These should be easier to throw away than the CDs but the big problem is back up. The movies take up significantly more space and even though they are backed up on two different servers/machines in the house a back up isn’t a backup unless it’s automated and off site. I have two back up services that I use to back up files and photos but the backing up over the net all of those movies just isn’t practical yet so I’m stuck. I’d love to move to an all digital environment but need the physical discs, just in case.
I know it’s very much a first world problem, and one we’re incredibly lucky to have, but that won’t stop me from having a moan.
I was going to suggest you start attending Zumba classes with me but I don’t think that will solve your main problem 🙂
We just packed all our DVDs down into those large wallets. It has saved heaps of space, which is great because we are about to move. I took my CDs into work, where I told staff they would have one for free and pay $2 for every disc after that. They probably devoured about 100 discs, and we’ll see some more in our garage sale and donate the rest to the op-shop.
I know this means that my music is now only stored in two places, on my iPod and on the computer, but I can live with that.
Add books to that list.