Friendly reminder not to store discs you care about (especially anything high density like Blu-ray, HD DVD, UHD Blu-ray) in a spindle.

It's not really a problem when they come from the factory like this 'cause they're stacked in a relatively dust-free environment, but when you re-use them, it's likely not as clean of an environment, and you can't necessarily guarantee that there
isn't debris between stacked discs.

This can cause a problem with every little movement - all that weight and friction of those discs stacked upon one another can cause some real damage, and in a circular pattern. Circular scratches are some of the most difficult to recover data from.

Binders have their own problems, but they're much less likely to do the same kind of damage to your discs. You should
not re-use a spindle from blank media to store discs you care about.
I doubt that many of you still hang onto a bunch of discs, and even fewer of you likely re-use spindles for storage, but I figured it's a good thing to flag regardless.
...let's just say I learned from experience.
I still have a couple of spindles with old media that I haven't touched in years. I need to go through them, back up the important discs, and toss what's fucked and doesn't matter.
​​
@maddy oh, is it true that you should store important disks in a freezer?
@fp32 Good question, but I'm not sure about that, specifically! ​​

I'd say the best way to store them is to keep the original, have a local backup somewhere on media you trust (mirrored storage, tape backup, whatever), and then a second backup stored in a remote location.

Basically, I'd never trust a single copy on any given media to last.
@maddy Well shit, THAT'S good to know. Our CD-Rs are mostly just OS installers but we've been putting them back on the spindle.
@maddy Uh, never thought about that 
@Weirdaholic I reached the "find out" stage when I went back through my Blu-ray collection after recycling the plastic cases for the majority of titles I had at the time, and stacked the discs on said spindles.

I had a handful of titles I just
couldn't dump.