Backing up your animes

I used to store everything in DVD-R's. I'm an avid animation collector, so the number of disks rose quickly. In about 3 years the number climbed close to 1000. As you can imagine from the insane amount of disks, handling them was near impossible. Keeping track of what was where was a hassle. Monthly inventory checks took over 6 hours to perform. I kept losing files due to scratches, lending and cd rot, no matter how much I tried to protect them.

So, about a year ago I said screw it and started storing everything in external HDD's. Backing everything up took nearly a month, but my inventory check became much simpler, I was able to implement tagging and location. Unfortunately, since I love high quality, I've replaced every show I can with BLU-RAY quality rips, which adds a considerable amount of GB to each already stored series. Series count is nearing 900 and over 6TB of space are already in use with no end in sight. Wouldn'a have it any other way though; it's my favorite hobby^^.



Word to the wise, HDD production has been stalled worldwide since last November. Aparently there was a flooding in production factories in Taiwan (or so I heard), so HDD's are becoming increasingly hard to acquire. Most retail stores limit sales to 1 unit per customer and of course prices have skyrocketed. 1TB disks cost as much as double what a 1.5TB disk cost before the halt. I'm guessing that production will normalize sometime around April before the end of the first finantial quarter and prices should return to normal, but who knows.

careful with the new externals... i've lost 2 now, and the last one had ALL of my anime on it, so you may wanna dump it and only use it for it, also be VERY CAREFUL about the power plug... mine came lose and i think fried the board on the HD =(