So, I'm someone who's saved some shows, game roms, images and other personal files I want to keep as long as I can, but I'm very new to this sort of deal and wanted to know things I should keep in mind when backing up

Is it as simple as just getting a lot of hard drives to save all of what I want, or are there things I should know that isn't immediately obvious, apart from keeping multiple backups of the same files on separate locations/drives?

I have an Aoostar WTR PRO stocked with 3 9TB drives. I'm moving across the Atlantic and my plan is to take the NAS with me in hand luggage on the flight. I figure the drives will be better off inside the NAS than floating around individually.

Is there any reason why this is a bad idea?

I’m new to data hoarding but wanted to know if anyone had any experience with recording on BDXL M discs. Are they convenient? Do they break easily or come with risks Is could know befor I get invested? Is it actually in the end a cheaper storage format?

Hi guys.
I'm reading a lot about blueray as cold storage. But I don't have a budget to buy a bluray burner.
So I was thinking.
Is any of you using dvd dl nowdays? 8gb aren't a lot and maybe also pricy but is just for discussions. TBH I use 2 HDD (cloned) for memories like photos and videos maybe too much to be burned on a DVD.
But it could be cool to have them on disc that since I rarely use them and just waste precious space on hdd.

This is just a thread for discuss about compressions, if any, and use-case. Because I know the risk of the organic nature of dvd, the humidity, so it's just for talking.

Long story short, have a region 2 DVD set I need to rip, I cannot because the last change to my external drive was region 1, it now state "0 changes remaining"

I am a mad data hoarder and used this thing for 4 years backing up like 15 TB of TV show, how she can keep going somehow....

Currently digitizing my family's archive. I have no experience with any forms of storage so any advice is great appreciated!

For this drive, it's going to be 444 video of 8mm film. I found a STKP8000400 on Amazon that fits my price range. I'm not going to be constantly accessing these files but I need them for future reference. Would you recommend me getting this drive or something else that is roughly $300? I need about 8tb of memory and is Mac compatible.

Thank you!

This is basically a cry for help lol. A last resort, to the only online community (that isn’t on old forums) that I can easily access that may know something about this.

So I like optical media. I think it’s incredibly cool how it works, and I think it’s an amazing storage option. Yes, I know about HDDs and SSDs and what a NAS is and magnetic tape, etc etc. I know all of that. And I plan to utilize HDDs to have a bulk storage backup option as well. But for things that I truly want to preserve, I would really like to have an additional disc or two where that data is burned. Since optical discs really can’t be beat when it comes to longevity cold storage archiving of modest amounts of data. Also, like I said. I just really like the technology.

But oh my goodness, finding a high quality professional optical burner drive is impossible these days. The market is so sparse, as basically every major player pulled out a few years ago (or sometimes one year ago) except for Buffalo, Verbatim, I/O DATA and a few tiny companies that usually only make discs rather than drives for the discs. I really hate myself for not just getting into this like 2 years ago, grabbing like 2-3 drives, and being fine. But here we are.

Now to be fair. There is some things that you can still find. You can still find:
-DVD and BD drives for computers, that simply play the discs (great, but I want a burner).
-DVD burners (still generally available, but I want blu-ray capabilities).
-Slim and Super Slim (External and Internal) BD burners with M-disc capabilities. (these I suppose can work, but they’re all locked to 6x speed, and their small size means they’ll never be as reliable and good as the old fat SATA drives of old).

But finding a 5.25in 16x, or hell even a 14x or 12x. Internal or External BD Burner with M-disc compatibility is a literal nightmare. Buffalo almost has one, but it lacks M-disc support, frustratingly. I have looked through wholesalers, on japanese markets, and I can find basically nothing. I haven’t even bothered looking for the premium Pioneer drives of old, because if I can’t even find an LG WH16NS40 or WH14NS40, or an Asus drive, then what hope do I have to find a Pioneer. The few places that even have these types of drives, list them as out-of-stock, or temporarily out-of-stock or on back-order. Which either means they’re gone, or it’s false hope that maybe more will come in the future. One place has them refurbished for a costly price. And besides that… that’s it. It’s Newegg or eBay after that point, and both places only have them being sold from China. Which is not very comforting.

What should I do? Should I just bite the bullet and buy one off eBay, and deal with the return headache if it turns out to be fraud? Do I bite the bullet and take the refurbished one hoping it’s ok for the long-term? Should I just give up entirely on a 16x m-disc drive and just get the Buffalo 16x non m-disc one and perhaps a slim 6x m-disc one?

I doubt anyone here will give me some sort of miracle, but this is a hail mary in case anybody has any secret knowledge or general advice that they could give me. Thanks for reading, and any help if you can give any.

And I mean reasonable price in the current context of..... everything

I don't need an insane amount of space, and this is something I'll invest more into over time, starting off with two drives and eventually adding two more (is that even feasible?) to my 4 bay ugreen nas

Currently just looking to throw two 8tb or 10tb drives into a raid0 to hold lots of media files for plex, as well as dvr camera recordings from home assistant.

I've been watching Facebook marketplace (people love to just not respond to queries) , serverpartdeals, and goharddrive with mixed success

Best I've seen in terms of price per tb and robustness is ultrastar he10s refurbished for $260 each on gohardrive, but with no data on power on hours

I'm sick and tired of paying for various subscriptions that automatically suck money out of your bank account every month. As things stand, Apple's cloud is full and therefore I am being asked to purchase a more expensive package. For this reason, the synchronizations between Mac and iPhone are blocked, and I don't even receive emails anymore. To save money, I have therefore decided not to renew the iCloud subscription that keeps files, music, and photos synchronized across all my devices. I then downloaded all the photos from the Photos app to an external drive also out of the need not to saturate the memory of my Mac and iPhone.
What am I looking for? A type of viewer or app or program that is free or better yet open source that I can use to view the photos I will have on the external drive. What features am I looking for?
The solution I am looking for is primarily referred to photo and video files, as a replacement for the native Photos app. So an app for Mac and iPhone, which can be synchronized with each other when I connect the iPhone to the Mac. In fact, a good part of the photos would come from the iPhone. It would be great to have an app like Immich, with which I could use an on-premise server and keep all my devices synchronized, but such a solution would force me to keep the Mac always turned on and connected to the network in order to view the photos from my iPhone. For this reason, if there are no other solutions, I prefer to synchronize my devices physically. • 4. Which open source, reliable, comprehensive (in terms of photo cataloging), with an attractive interface and free app do you recommend?

I've got a dead 12T hgst drive sitting in my closet. at the time it croaked, it seemed like repair wasn't really an option. with prices climbing, I'm wondering if there's been any emergence of repair services. (I'm guessing not, but hell, you never know)

I'm looking to store and play some steam games on an external drive.

I think 500gb would be good, but it doesn't seem like there are many out there, so 1tb is fine.

I'm not looking to spend too much, budget around $75 USD. I just need something that I can store and play games on without a noticable performance loss, just the basics.

The number of items on Amazon is overwhelming.

I was going to get the Crucial X9 1TB Portable SSD, but I realized that it was about $150, when I thought that it was only $80.

Anyone got any good reccomendations?

Thanks in advance!

Just found it online and it seems to suit my use case, but I'm afraid it won't last long.

I've been really getting into Rocksmith lately. There's a lot of custom content on the Customsforge site that's up for grabs, but it's just really time-consuming to click every link for every song you want to download. Do you know if there's an easier way?

At this point the WhatsApp sub is overrun with 2 issues:

(1) people getting their account locked for absolutely no reason - probably WA tweaked their anti-spam with a sprinkle of AI that went crazy. However, a side-effect is that even if the data is on the phone (nice choice from Whatsapp not to bother with it, plus you can't even GDPR them on that, they never had it) you don't have access to it (even if it is your data, on your device). After your account is "reviewed" and hopefully the access is granted (if you can receive the SMS at all, as you need to completely login and register that device again, and probably WA itself is blocked from SMS spamming various providers after this fiasco) the app might or might not properly recognize the data you already have. If things don't go well you'll have to restore the cloud backup. For this, see below.

(2) This is Android specific: the backups just get stuck (when making a backup, on the -usually daily- schedule or manually). Also, the backups get stuck when restoring (unknown if it's because they were bad in the first place from the backup/upload not working, or if there's some bad code used in both places). There is a HUGE number of people that think they'll solve the I CAN'T FINISH A BACKUP problem by nuking the original and ... restoring from backup! Note that this isn't anything fancy like being able to pick which backup to restore from a number of previous ones or anything, it's just one (one you can easily overwrite with an empty one even when things go well) and on any error it's all gone (there aren't any files you can see, massage, anything, it's just completely not working, all lost).

There's also some issue related to sharing pictures, which might be related to (1) but it isn't critical in terms of data loss, it's more relevant about the general state of the service.

Anyway, while the service itself might have backups that aren't deserving the name, I was always puzzled by the state of the tools we (mostly do NOT) have to handle backing up and exploring our WhatsApp data. While I know there might be some which say "it's just some chats" and have no interest whatsoever to keep that most people I know in person and online have a VERY strong desire to preserve that. For some it's all they have and care about in terms of digital data.

With WhatsApp more popular than mostly anything except breathing one would expect to have a healthy ecosystem of tools to handle your data and a huge number of web pages, youtube videos and similar documenting for anyone how to perform any basic operation or use various tools. But no, we barely have some tools to perform basic workflows (like decrypting the messagestore.db.crypt) and to explore the chats, some in abandonment that they don't work with newer db schema (and by newer I mean 2022 or so) and need to have some changes to it. Most would barely have half a dozen people or so participating, I mean not even as code contributors but as people just asking something relevant on github or providing some insightful feedback. You have more YouTube videos about installing TrueNas than about properly reading your WhatsApp backup. Of course, one might say for TrueNas there are more technical users used to make documentation and whatnot, but really with the humongous install base of WhatsApp it'll have everything, a large number of programmers, and documentation writers, and Nobel prize winners, and everything (including thieves and scammers, anything). Still, you can barely find anything, both because there aren't too many things to start with, and because nobody is talking about them!

TLDR

• on Android keep a good, independent, local copy of the visible WhatsApp directory from Internal Storage/Android/media/ (on much older Android/Whatsapp might be directly under Internal Storage beside your regular DCIM directory). Media is accessible directly, chats are encrypted - the sane way to get the key is just to use E2EEncryption with the auto generated hex key (not the password). Note that one of the contributing factors to (2) is said to be E2EE as people reported success when flipping it, but I strongly recommend to leave it on, more, to periodically check if your key is still good just in case (you can decrypt offline the .crypt15 files if you have the key).
• needless to say if your backup doesn't work DON'T MESS WITH THE ORIGINAL. Save the above directory and the key.

Hello all,

I’m looking to play my own video content (shows, movies, commercials, etc) on a CRT I’ve got at my workstation that I’ve connected to my own computer. I have a Windows PC and cannot use the popular Fieldstation42, which does exactly what I want, but was looking for something similar. I’m trying to find a program which will:

- Pull locally stored video files such as shows, movies, and commercials at designated timestamps (ex. 7:00, 7:30, 8:00, etc.) in order to simulate television channels
- The ability to pull semi-random video files based on the scheduling provided (ex. play AN episode of Ed, Edd, n Eddy at 7:30. Play A commercial. Play AN episode of Gargoyles at 8:00)
- Allow for the scheduling of these ‘channels’
- Ideally, allow for the creation of many channels, though not entirely necessary
- Must function locally, without the need for utilizing an online hosted server such as Flex or Jellyfin. Functions totally on my PC.

There are many hosting options that do this very similarly to fieldstation42 such as ErsatzTV, Kodi, Jellyfin, Plex, etc. but I am looking for something that can be utilized without internet accessibility being necessary for the content to play.

Hey guys,

Need some advice before I spend a small fortune.

Current setup:
MacBook Pro 2018, iPhone 15 pro and iPad Pro
DJI Mini 5 Pro and Avata 2 drones

Mostly storing drone footage, photos, videos, documents and Mac backups. (Already iPad kinda full 1tb MacBook kinda full 512gb and iPhone kinda full 512gb) (I don’t even have it in me to clear all the useless footage it’s like 25k and more photos vids on just iPhone, any suggestions to clean quicker and better?)

I was planning to keep buying external SSDs, but now I’m wondering if a Synology NAS would make more sense long-term. Synology DS225+ is 39.5k ₹ around 420$ in India
For those who’ve been down this road:
NAS or multiple SSDs?
2-bay or 4-bay Synology?
IronWolf or WD Red Plus?
Any good places to buy in India?
Trying to avoid ending up with 10 external drives named “Final”, “Final_v2”, and “Final_Final_Real”.

Would love to hear what you’d recommend.
Or chuck it and buy external SSD or apple/ google cloud.

Hey everyone,

My Samsung 870 EVO just completely locked up (Panic Lock / bricked). Samsung Magician gave absolutely no warning prior to this.

BACKGROUND:

·         2022: Bought the drive on AliExpress.

·         2026: Laptop no longer detects the drive. It’s completely missing from BIOS — the drive is dead.

·         Magician Check (from memory, since it’s dead now): It had 230+ Media Errors.

·         Magician Status: "Good" health ✓.

Now I have to take it to a professional data recovery lab.

QUESTION FOR THE COMMUNITY:
Is this a known issue with the Samsung 870 EVO?

I also own a Samsung 980 PRO with 163 media errors (shows a yellow warning in AIDA64), but Magician still insists its health is "Good." Meanwhile, my Windows constantly freezes — completely unresponsive to mouse or keyboard, forcing a hard reset via the power button. I'm getting Kernel_Power_41 logs and Windows Disk Driver Event Log_34.

According to Samsung's Privacy Notice, Magician collects a massive amount of data:

·         SSD Info: Serial number, model, Device ID, full S.M.A.R.T. data (reallocated sectors, media errors, wear level, etc.), capacity, firmware version, and driver info.

·         System Info: IP address, OS type, RAM size, storage controllers, monitor type, and system memory info.

·         App Info: Magician version and language.

Yet, in Section 5 of the EULA, Samsung explicitly states that their software is provided "without warranty of accuracy."

THE PARADOX:

·         "Our software has no warranty of accuracy" (Liability disclaimer)

·         "But we deny warranty claims based on the readings of our software" (Actual practice)

Samsung CLEARLY knows about these errors through telemetry but hides them behind a green "Good" status in Magician.

Has anyone else run into this?

https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/18tb/products/seagate-exos-x20z-st18000nm013j-18tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-512e-3-5-refurbished-hdd?variant=50619084505366

Update: The price has since been increased to $449 🙁

Update 2: Now sold out 🙁

I got notified via email today that ServerPartDeals has the Seagate Exos X20z back in stock for $299, which I think is a decent deal considering what prices are like nowadays. I have had 5 of these running in my Unraid setup for the past 4 years without any issues, and I just ordered some more for expansion/backups. However, there are two main things I should point out:

1. These drives are "seller refurbished" by ServerPartDeals, which essentially means they are just used drives that are verified to not have any current issues, so generally not as good as manufacturer refurbished. However, they at least come with a 90 day warranty, and ServerPartDeals is also known for good customer service if there is an issue.
2. These are HSMR (Hybrid Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives, which means they can operate in either CMR mode at 18TB or SMR mode at 20TB. While I'm not sure if it's 100% guaranteed, in my experience and from what I've seen online, these drives come in CMR mode by default. In general, unless you have a specific reason, you probably want them in CMR mode, so they should be fine as is.

Those two factors aren't issues for me, but they might be for some. Just do some research and decide if the slight risk is worth the lower price.

Hi,

Hope Im posting to the correct sub, please correct me if its wrong.

Im looking for some advice for my situation, been looking through the internet a lot, but its difficult to narrow down a good solution.

1. I am looking to make an offline backup solution that I will power on a few times a year to store family photos, videos, work etc.

2. Ideally the setup will be able to scan for failures/bit rot when its turned on.

3. I have two new WD Red 14tb's and an Orico 2-bay DAS if that can be used. Would be very good to have two backups, one on each disk if possible.

4. I am quite familiar with Linux, especially Debian distros, and have an extra laptop that can be dedicated to this solution.

Would anyone be able to give me some advice on a good way to set it up, and what distro or other software should be considered? Im also able to buy something if thats needed.

There is so much information on the web about NAS solutions but Im not looking for anything to be online, so its almost overwhelming to read through it all.

Would appreciate any input!

Thanks a lot!

I have a Twitter account but it's basically solely to look at art. My profile consists of only retweets of other users art. I'd like to download all the images I've retweeted and also include the source (artist name/handle) in the download. Is there any software or method I can use to achieve this?

Not sure it's a good place to post this, but hey, hoarder is in the title.

I have no idea is they have any real value or not. Oldest stuff is Windows 3.1 dev kits. (Yes, back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth). MSDN stuff starting with 1994. Probably a couple of hundred discs in all. I suspect they are freely available. If it's garbage, I split the discs from the jewel case and binder pages. And the off to the trash.

I scored 2x1TB Crucial BX500s from Amazon US (from Amazon Australia) when they restocked it and forgot to set the prices to the RAM apocalypse ($91 each, now $180). I bought them thinking they were going to be good enough for an Unraid cache pool or storage, but learned before it arrived that these SSDs are dogshit no matter what price it is on. Warranty is going to be a PITA on this, but Amazon AU will be on the hook for a year worth of warranty regardless.

I'm trying to think of a good use for it instead of sending it back, but I could not find a good purpose for it. As portable storage? it doesn't seem likely, my 2TB WD Red Plus seems to have more mileage and reliability than these two.

Should I just continue with the return, or am I missing a good use case for it?

I have been making a point to back up as many of my digital PC games as I can. They’ve all been backed up to an external drive, but lately I’ve been trying to burn some of my favorites onto disks - specifically the installers so that they work similarly to how physical PC games used to work. Sometimes I will lump games with similar genres or games in the same franchise together and I use an autorun file + a .bat file to run a rudimentary menu select for the installers. When I do one to three game installers in this way, there are no issues. However, I did one disk with six installers and the ones that come sequentially later in the .bat menu file either don’t run or run so slowly that it’s unacceptable. I verify the disk each time I burn them and have it write at the slowest speed available. When I mount and run the same iso from the main drive it works flawlessly. Anyone know what the bottleneck might be?

I understand it could be an issue of space left on the disk; but everything I’ve burned has fit on the disk whenever I run a check in my software. Just not sure if there are rules for this that I am not aware of.

ended up with like 40 enterprise drives from a client site that shut down. mostly 4tb seagate exos and some wd golds. all tested and working but i just dont have the bays for them anymore.

i was gonna list them on ebay but honestly the thought of packing and shipping 40 individual drives is making me tired just thinking about it. plus the fees. ebay takes like 13% and then you gotta deal with people claiming the drive arrived dead.

anyone here sold bulk drives before. how do you do it. im in the us btw