Hampshire College is closing next month. I do not have the necessary abilities or hardware to save the Web site. Has anyone else done so, or is willing to do so?

I have 2 WD Ultrastar drives - HC550 18TB and a newer HC560 20TB that I use for offline backup of my systems.

When copying data on these drives (4TB of data), I've noticed that the HC550 18TB Drive has a constant write speed nearing the top of the transfer rate while the HC560 20TB transfer speed varies a lot (see the two pictures).

Not sure if relevant but the drives are not new (the 18TB is maybe 3 years old, the 20TB maybe 1Year old). I am using an Sabrent Docking station to transfer from an SSD to the HDDs.

Does this mean anything? Should I worry about it or do something about it?

Thanks

I purchased a secondhand Promise Technology Atlas S8+ Thunderbolt 3 NAS enclosure (a rebadged QSAN XCubeNAS XN8008T), with a Thunderbolt 3 PCIe card installed. I am trying to get it to mount as a Thunderbolt 3 DAS on my MacBook Pro M3, in order to consolidate my video editing storage.

The data sheets from both Promise and QSAN mention a DAS mode when plugged directly between the NAS and the Mac. The NAS will mount over Thunderbolt Networking (as SMB volumes), but not as a direct plug-and-play Thunderbolt device. Built-in Ethernet is working.

It also will not pass Thunderbolt mounts from other devices down the chain (a Promise Pegasus R6 and a GSpeed Studio XL, both of which mount fine on the Mac when directly connected).

I am running the latest firmware (QSAN QSM 3.5.4; Promise ASM 3.0.7 also would not mount as a DAS.) I have reached out to Promise, and though they respond quickly, they keep saying they'll have an answer within a week, but it's been more than 2 months—I can't even get them to confirm that the device supports DAS over Thunderbolt. QSAN has not responded at all to inquiries via their site or email.

The Mac is running 26.6.3.

I've been considering using LTO5/6 for tertiary backups but I am worried about the environmental issues of having to control temperature and humidity (for dust I could use an air purifyer?). I have read about using vacuum sealed bags for each tape in long term storage or in sealable boxes with desiccant bags.

Are older generations of LTO less sensitive to temp/humidity? I heard that newer gens like LTO8+ have much stricter requirements.

What affect does storing tapes in non optimal conditions mean for longevity? Supposedly can get up to 30 years of life in perfect conditions. Would 5-10 years in less than pefect conditions be realistic? What about rewriting the tapes at set intervals?

Built NAS before the prices got crazy with a 16TB for parity and a 10TB for storage to start. No big deal to buy more drives, I foolishly thought when the 16TB was only $320.

I ended up getting two 14TB MDD drives for $350ea because I couldn't stomach the $700-800 for a single new 16TB.

Pictured is the preclear that just finished for each of them. Here's to a long and uneventful life.

Anyone have a way to backup the server? Would love a good scraper to pull updated stories as well.

Sharing this because it bites people who archive "clean" copies of contracts, receipts, and IDs. A PDF usually contains more data than its visible pages. Five things worth knowing, all checkable in about a minute with standard open-source CLIs:

1. Hidden text under black boxes. Most casual "redaction" is just a filled rectangle drawn on top — the original characters stay in the text layer. Check: select-all, copy, paste into a text editor. Or: pdftotext file.pdf - | grep "sensitive-string". If it prints, it was never removed.

2. Revision history from incremental saves. PDFs saved incrementally append new objects; older versions of pages can linger in the file until a full rewrite. One file can silently hold several generations of edits. qpdf --show-xref file.pdf tells you how many cross-reference sections exist; for uncompressed parts, strings + grep works directly.

3. Metadata. Author, producer string, creation timestamps, original file paths, and (if images are embedded) camera EXIF with GPS. exiftool file.pdf dumps all of it in plain sight.

4. Embedded files. PDF supports file attachments, and Word/LibreOffice exports often embed XML data parts. pdfdetach -list file.pdf shows what's riding along.

5. CID font encodings. Pasted/extracted text can look like garbage even when the original strings are fully recoverable with proper tooling. Scrambled output does NOT mean "data destroyed."

The data-hoarding angle cuts both ways: your archive may hold more sensitive leftovers than you think — but it may also preserve earlier document revisions you didn't know you kept, which is occasionally a feature.

Happy to answer questions on the mechanics (text layers vs. drawings, when incremental saves happen, why scans behave differently).

ST30000NT011-3V2103 drives were tested while newly purchased (same batch) and empty before deployment - from slowest to fastest, the sequential read speeds are 231MB/s, 243MB/s, 249MB/s, 267MB/s. Variance when repeating test is <1% so the results are consistent. Spec sheet says max 275MB/s. SMART readings look ok (no errors, new drives). Is this normal?

I want to store kiwix offine wikipedia app and its libraries for my android S24 in case of blackout or emergencies.

Im also wanting to store PDF books on survival, such as medical, how to repair electronics, what mushrooms are safe to eat, etc.

Thinking this is a good moment to also use a physical backup of my cloud project files and sensitive docs.

So Im considering between:

- samsung t7 external ssd (but i read on this sub they get slow after a while?)

- Satechi M.2 NVMe Mini SSD Enclosure: https://www.amazon.com/Satechi-Enclosure-Transfer-Pass-Through-Charging/dp/B0FNSCFK8M

- orico 40Gbps M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure​

Other than this, Im planning on getting a basic toshiba HDD as I know it lasts longer.

I dont imagine I will work directly from these drives and maybe write data 1-2 times a year, so Im thinking theyd last long? Also wondering if the ssd i listed are compatible with my android phone or theyd drain my battery fast?

I tried to ask AI for advice but it overlooked a bunch of stuff and i felt itd have to hand hold it and teach it basic stuff and would get more value out of asking this sub directly instead of stressing over with robots

I don't know if this belongs in homelab or DataHoarder, but I think here i will more understandable people.

Started my server since 2018, today I finally shut it down. Until an undisclosed date. </3

started with a single 1TB drive, then moved to two mirrored drives, and eventually evolved to a 6x12 60TB raidz1, running on recertified drives

Everything was fine until today, when one of the drives gave me the red notification..

And here's whats grinds my gear I bought each drives for $199 each. Today the same costs over $460 each!

Thanks to corona then AI, then expensive streaming services, then the USA wars, and now the Hormuz situation...

But honestly, the biggest thing that hurts isn't even the hardware cost.

It's how much my family and I start relying on this server around. We started relying on it to think it will last for ever even me and i knew this day was

My loss:

- 3,000+ movies

- Hundreds of audiobooks

- 50,000+ music tracks

- My personal VPN server

- My music analyzer

- My virtual testing environment

- My vibe-coding hosting environment

- And a bunch of other little services that made life easier.

All gone offline in one afternoon.

Now I have two ways to go:

1. Wait it out: Hope drive prices eventually come back down to reasonable levels so i replace it and resiliver it.

2. Downsize: Build a new 30TB server, which is roughly what I'm currently using anyway, with cheaper easier to find disks in my country

3. Simplify: Give up hosting movies altogether and keep a small 4TB server for the essentials.

I haven't decided yet just want to share it

I know this might sound ridiculous to people outside this hobby, but there's something genuinely heartbreaking about shutting down a system you've been building, maintaining, and expanding for years.

I told this story to my family they couldn't care less.. they should pay to me

I figured if there's one place where people might actually understand this feeling, it's here.

Thanks for reading, if you didnt thanks for passing by

Hi everyone. So a lot of VHS cover scans only exist on old blogspot blogs and Tumblrs that are slowly disappearing, and I couldn’t find one place that kept them properly catalogued. So I started pulling them into one archive.

What’s there:

• 20k+ covers, full wraps (front, spine, back) where possible, in the best resolution I can find, with another 20k being processed

• Sourced from Archive.org, old blogs, Tumblrs and many Wayback Machine collections

• Sorted and labelled on my old gaming PC with a small OCR/AI model I trained (title and region) and a lot of manual checks in between

• Free API, no key hoops, no ads, no tracking

• Everything getting backed up to archive.org once the database is clean enough

• Code adnd data model going open source

Being honest about the state of it: roughly 1 in 20 scans is wrong or mislabelled, and im working through it by hand.

If you’re sitting on a folder of cover scans, you can bulk upload, and flagging bad labels or watermarks helps a lot too. Also very open to advice on mirroring other than my existing plans. I’d rather this outlive me and my server.

👉 https://videotapes.io

Lately I've been seeing lots of anti open-models articles and papers, and after the recent coup at Nvidia (they are in the process of buying Hugging Face) a ban on open source models would not surprise me.

Yes once again yet another outage that proves that handing your data to third parties thinking you are getting rid of a problem that someone else can handle more reliably is not the move.

While they generally have more reliability and redundancy than local consumer setups, it feels like it only takes 1 major failure to affect much more people than if everyone and every organisation had it's own solution.

In the enterprise world it seems like Microsoft attracts clients by offering enticing packages to get you stuck and dependent on their ecosystem in the long run.

Hi,

I am trying to help my father convert a bunch of with various formats (PAL, SECAM, NTSC 3.58, NTSC 4.43, PAL-M, PAL-N etc) to a digital format using windows.

Up until this point he was using ezcap I bought in 2015 (I think ezcap 138), but it started having problems with the capture itself. I bought ezcap 158, but it seems it only supports 2 formats which means it doesn't show any image from some of the tapes (they also changed programs and the program is worse).

After that I have been trying to find an alternative, but there is so much information and terms I do not understand (for example what on earth is s-video, or uncompressed video in this instance or TBC and so on), which makes this entire thing very difficult.

Are there guides for this for beginners? or setups that people can share that I can try and replicate? While I don't exactly want to spend too much money, I would like to see the options available low end to high end solutions for this.

I do apologize if some of my questions seem basic, but I am truly lost in this entire thing.

Is there a simple way to export all posts, photos and data from Google Classroom? My son is in grade five and I’d love to be able to save things from his school without manually going through each post.

Heyo.

So, I snagged a workstation from a Norwegian company, Argeo ASA (https://argeo.no/), after they went bust. Of course I can't help myself from peeking through what is on the computer before I wipe it and load up server software instead on the thing.

I did find though that there seems to be a fair few internal files available on this thing.

Since internal documents seem to go byebye often when companies does, I'm wondering if I should archive anything from here, but I kinda lack the industry knowledge to know what I am even looking at and if it's worthwhile for anything...

Anyone familiar with this industry? There's a fair bit of data here... bits and pieces in archives on the OS drive:

And some stuffs on the secondary drive:

I have two 3tb WD Red drives i used in a media nas roughly ten years ago. I only had them on when watching movies over the last ten years so they've had very low to minimum use if any at all.

I'm now building a new 24/7 nas and was considering using these as my main storage drives. Would this be fine given their low usage over the last ten years or does their age overrule using them for a 24/7 use case?

I currently have approximately 12TB of data stored across three 5TB Seagate One Touch external hard drives. I don't anticipate exceeding 15TB, so these three drives will likely be the permanent storage set I want to preserve long-term.

I also have three additional 5TB Seagate drives that serve as 1:1 cloned cold backups of the originals.

I'm sure some people will suggest a better storage solution, such as larger-capacity drives or a NAS. However, I already own these six drives, and unless there's a reasonably cost-effective alternative, I'd prefer to work with what I have rather than spend a lot of money upgrading everything.

I recently did a rough audit of my media collection and estimate that approximately 7.5TB (roughly half) consists of content that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to replace or download again.

With storage prices seemingly continuing to rise, I'm trying to figure out the most cost-effective way to ensure that my data, particularly that irreplaceable 7.5TB, survives for the long haul.

I've been doing some research online and through this subreddit. From what I've gathered, HDDs have an average useful lifespan that is often quoted at around 5–10 years, although I understand that any drive can fail at any time.

I'm trying to determine the best long-term preservation strategy. A few possibilities I've considered:

- Keep my current setup: Maintain the three primary drives and their three cloned backups, periodically checking drive health and replacing the primary or backup drives as needed.

- Create additional backups of essential data: Instead of maintaining 1:1 clones of all three drives, make an additional copy of the approximately 7.5TB of irreplaceable content. This would give that data three copies rather than two, while keeping the more easily replaceable media in a single copy with no backup..

- Consider another approach: Perhaps there's a more reliable or cost-effective way to manage long-term storage using the drives I already own.

I'm not particularly wealthy, so while I'm willing to invest in additional drives when necessary, I'd rather avoid spending a small fortune on a completely new storage setup.

What would you recommend for someone in my situation?

Would you stick with the existing six-drive arrangement, prioritize additional copies of the irreplaceable data, or take a different approach altogether?

EDIT: Thanks everyone for the suggestions and advice. I appreciate the different options suggested that I hadn't considered.

I'm trying to balance preserving my collection with the cost, complexity, and learning curve of unfamiliar technologies. I want a solution that's effective but also practical for me to maintain.

I'm currently leaning toward:

Creating an additional backup of my roughly 7.5TB of difficult-to-replace media and storing it off-site (I have easy access to a family member's location).

Using checksum verification to periodically check for silent data corruption.

One clarification: by "irreplaceable," I mean from an entertainment media perspective, not personal or family files. Losing it would be pretty disappointing, but not devastating. I'm simply trying to find a sensible balance between preservation and practicality.

Thanks again.

Looking to archive ~40TB of new models.

I already have the arXiv dump and Sci-Hub on a separate server, Sci-Hub is ~90TB and arXiv is ~16TB. Off the top of my head I think these are probably the two most important datasets to archive..

On my list so far still to archive is:

• K3.1 Pro

• GLM-5.3 (+Flash)

• DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017

• Qwen3.8 (will replace with Qwen4 when it is out)

• Gemma 4

• LFM3 series

Am I missing anything? Is there anything else I should grab? Thinking about making the archive public at some point.

(I've released abliterations on many of the recent large models so I have copies/diffs of most on a separate server.)

Barbdrivs

I want to find YouTube videos where a specific phrase is spoken, by searching the subtitles/captions.

What I’m hoping for:

• Type a phrase, get a list of videos whose captions contain it

• Ideally with timestamps, so I can jump to the exact moment

• Either within one specific channel, or across YouTube in general

Windows, free or paid, or a website are all fine.
Not looking for a downloader, just a way to search inside captions.

Thanks!

When I use archive.li for opening News Corp pay walled articles, it tends to usually work ok, but I notice when using it this week, it's not working on any articles from the website below, as I get what's in the screen shot I've attached for the article below as an example. Does anyone know what's going on?

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news%25252525252525252525252Fqueensland%25252525252525252525252Fconstruction-on-new-14bn-woolloongabba-indoor-arena-to-begin-in-january%25252525252525252525252Fnews-story%25252525252525252525252Fc87b933a9efce6a1c48cbab26123e0fa

Im just curious to ask if there are any websites that offer anything related to nostalgia from games,cartoons,videos,music,movies,old toys.consoles,the outfits and so on my point is to find like a database,wikis,and similar but must be from EU,North America and rest of the continents and countries reason why is becuase i dont wanna use social media too much for it when i can just bookmark these sites incase i wanna find something related to my nostalgia and yes that includes Croatian and balkan nostalgia of what Millenials and Gen Z grew up with.

Any help is appreciated.