During my lengthy period of being an invalid, I've decided there are two tasks I'm going to tackle. One of them is to completely re-burn my mp3 collection with a new naming convention and on all black media. On top of that, I'm going to then "double" burn it on cheap media. The cheap media is going to be the "usable" media, and the black media will be the "master" copies. When I wear out one of the useable media, I will burn a new copy from the master.
I'm doing this for several reasons, first foremost, to get a naming convention that is more conducive to use in mp3 players and secondly, to consolidate 7 years worth of collecting into a more elegant collection. I've saved lots of things over the years that I know I'll never listen to again. Finally, and most obviously, to create redundancy. I've lost stuff over the years because I've lost a disc, or a disc has become damaged. I figure it'll be simpler to have the redundancy than trying to find something again.
The other thing I want to do is to revamp the Beastie Boys site I run. See, the Beastie Boys have a new record coming out this June, so I was thinking it's something I should do, I just hadn't devoted any time to it yet. Well, time is all I've got for the next two months. I've been expecting a spike in traffic in anticipation of the new album... and boy has it happened. I usually average about 600-700 hits a week, with occasional forays into the quad digits. On sunday I had (drum roll) in excess of 5,000 hits... just on Sunday! And so far today, I've already had nearly 1,000. I did a little research through some logging tools at my disposalbe and discovered that someone posted my site link to Metafilter which was responsible for a lot of it.
I feel like a big time webmaster now or something. I feel I have a bit of an obligation to make the website look a little more presentable.
go get yourself 2 or 3 200 gig HDs
get a USB to IDE converter (they sell them all over the place)
dump all your shit to the hard-drive(s)
fix up your list
now you have high-density removable storage, its not read-only, so if you dont like that naming convention, you can always change it. its not scratchable, and it takes up way less space.
the only problem i have with doing it on hard drives is that they are 1) machines themselves and therefore susceptible to failure and 2) they are magnetic... these two issues would require me to go with 2, 200 gig drives, just to handle my current collection (1 for the collection, the 2nd for a copy for redundancy purposes) plus whatever i add in the future....
i dunno... i mean i know high capacity drives are getting cheaper by the day, but i think i'd feel more comfortable with them backed up on optical media + it is more cost effective... space is not really an issue for me so much as the money is, and peace of mind... :)