[ashtonkem]

> People literally managed books full of CDs or jewel cases, DVD racks, cassette tapes, LP collections, people had an entire rack in their house dedicated to hardware designed explicitly to use these cumbersome things, people torrented and used gnutella and managed software CDs, movie CDs, photo albums, VHS collections and the like just fine for ages.

Sounds like you’re trying to generalize from a very small set of people. The percentage of the population that had specialized full sized racks for their torrented stuff and what not was very, very small. For the rest of it, I imagine that “large drawer next to the desk” was the #1 solution, followed up by “in the car somewhere” for music CDs.

For the average person, the actual backup procedure from that era was very poor. Frankly, I doubt many did it at all. Even the nerds I knew mostly did a pretty half assed job, all considered. What professional backup software hosted in the cloud today blows even the most thorough technique from any consumer in the 1990s out of the water.

[betwixthewires]

The racks was a reference to entertainment centers, not torrents. That was just about everybody.