Over the last month and a half, I've been furiously working on a new book. No, it's not about "stuff". But it does have something to do with my two biggest passions in life: music and mathematics. I've set the end of the month as a deadline for myself to complete it. That's all I'm going to say about it for now.
As far as clutter goes, one of my more recent areas of attack were by sticks of burned data CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. I have these going back at least a dozen years. These days, the CD-R seems to be on its way out. It's not just audio CDs giving away to mp3 players, but there are lots of other faster, cheaper and sometimes safer ways to store data these days: the exponentially cheaper hard drives and even thumb drives of today, data clouds, bigger webspace, faster internet speeds, etc. I even read that a 128gb SD card in the works. Granted, a dual layer DVD-R can store 12 times the amount of data on a standard CD-R, and a Blu-Ray data disc can store eaven more than that. But I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 10 years, the CD-ROM drive goes the way of the floppy drive.
Regardless, I've still got 10 years worth of data on burned discs, not all of which is doubly backed up on some other source. Having a 1TB hard drive in the year 2001 was unheard of. So those files had to go somewhere. I had a few music mix CDs I burned, too. It was time to go through these home-made discs and decide which ones to keep, which ones to throw out, and which ones to just extract a thing or two before throwing them out. Then out of the ones to keep, it was a matter of organizing them.
To help with this, I bought an Atlantic Parade disc holder from K-mart.
It holds 96 discs total in 4 slide-out books, which you can also label in the front. Obviously this means getting rid of the cases and insert booklets, but since I didn't really have any booklets on my data discs (I typically just wrote the description on the discs themselves with a marker) or anything fancy in the cases, this was fine. The whole thing is about 7 inches wide.
I've talked before about storing discs in different sorts of holders in order to save space. I still keep most of my movies in bigger 3-ring binders. But this is another product I'd recommend if you're not concerned with keeping cases or booklets.
