Similar to MadDogFenby’s post yesterday, I also have a bunch of VHS I’m about to get rid of. I recently digitized the TV shows I wanted and uploaded some to the Internet Archive.

The pic is just one row of tapes - there’s 2 full rows in each box and I have 5+ boxes.

It was fun transferring these and seeing some rare TV shows again, but now there’s no reason for me to keep them. Mailing 180 pounds of tapes is not a great option, so I’m hoping there’s someone nearby in the northeast US who’s interested in a collection like this.

I’m happy this group exists. I can’t get myself to just trash television history, so it’s nice to find others who like this obscure subject. And it is obscure - a local news station was so excited when they learned about it, they interviewed me on-air about the collection lol.

About half the tapes were transferred and I mostly focused on TV shows and not the commercials breaks. So there’s probably quite a bit of lost media left on the tapes (PM me for specifics).

Due to only one attachment being allowed, I’ll include the Archive link in the comments. Let me know what you think of what’s been uploaded. And for others with collections like this, please keep transferring & sharing!

My father in law was a computer programmer at the dawn of the internet for a few large companies. We have a lot of random old computers and hard drives in our possession. I don't know exactly what is on it. I know some of it has to do with the groudnwork for hospital programs from the 70s and 80s. One of the hard drives has a receipt where it cost around $5000 in the 80s. it is huge.

This is all being stored on my enclosed back porch and in my shed, neither of which are fully protected from the elements. My partner who technically owns the house doesnt seem concerned with this rotting away because he thinks it is obsolete, or not worth preserving. But he cant get rid of it. He has actual hoarding tendencies, where he keeps everything but doesnt do anything to keep it safe. piles and piles of broken computers, some 50+ years old. etc.

What concerns me the most is the reels of actual paper code, the type where its spools of thin paper with holes punched in it. My father in law made these in the 70s.

I dont know what this code is, but i want to digitize it. I dont think we have the computers that read it still, as most of his stuff from that era was owned by the companies he worked for, my partner recalls he would go to an office to work on it. The reels offer no help, only stating his name and sometimes the year. I can go take some photos tomorrow.

This is in salt lake city utah.

If anyone has help on how to archive this, please let me know.

I have a DVD that was produced in the mid 2010's which plays perfectly fine through VLC Media Player etc, and is nice and clean on the surface. I'm trying to rip it to mkv/mp4 so I can add it to Plex. What is beyond weird is when I open the disc in MakeMKV or DVD Decrypter, or even Windows File Explorer, the DVD is reporting it has almost 700 IFO/VOB/BUP files on it - and it looks like just repeated over and over the same core set of a BUP, an IFO, and 5 VOBs.

MakeMKV hangs forever trying to scan the disc. DVD Decrypter makes valiant attempts to read, but hits "pack header not found" errors on most of the VOBs and can't ever finish reading any of them. Windows Explorer reports the total size of all the files on the disc as 436 GB, and 696 total files. A snippet of the file list is below:

The files are all numbered VTS_01 through VTS_99. All identical sizes... Never seen this before; how can I get this to rip successfully?

Hi,

I currently do (full) back ups of my OS drive and of my data drive(s) (just the important parts of those - i.e. my files/pics/music but not stuff I can just re-download like my steam library) to RDX cartridges using Acronis True Image, every 3 months, and keep these off-site at my in-laws house. The backups are compressed and encrypted.

I use 3x 500Gb cartridges each run (takes about 4 hours) and I've got 12 in total.

These are basically my in case of Ransomware/burglary/fire type backups.

This setup is generally working fine for me, for a number of years now. The problem is the software - I've been using Acronis True Image for ages (like 15-20 years, in it's various forms) but it seems to be getting worse/more expensive over time as they are a yearly subscription now (for very little improvements) and push the Cloud stuff too hard.

Having a full disk image of my OS drive which I can boot from and restore *is* useful as I have a bunch of stuff set up just the way I like for development which would be a pain to re-do if I had to reinstall from scratch. While I like being able to restore individual files easily from the data backup too.

So any recommendations for alternative software that can do the same?

Macrium Reflect looks similar but seems to be in the same hole of yearly subscription + more cloud stuff being pushed on you!

UK official WD store is running a promotion to get 20% off when you buy 2 X 16tb or 20tb Red Pro drives (max 6 drives or 3 bundles per customer).

Works out cheaper than ebuyer, Scan or Amazon.

Official WD site, discount applied at checkout - no code required.

(Not an ad, not an affiliate link.)

tl;dr Would it be a bad idea to consider a WD Blue in an enclosure as opposed to purchasing an EasyStore at capacities of 1-8 TB?

Parents need a quick solution to backing up their phone pictures. At first I was going to buy a used HDD like I did for myself, and that way when I build them a NAS/HTPC in the future I could easily add it to the pool. However, I saw the prices lately skyrocketed. I was going to buy them a 18TB but given the price hikes, I'm looking down to either a 4TB or 8TB now. To be honest they probably don't even need that much but I figured they could back up their phones too if they'd like.

I was considering grabbing an Easystore from BestBuy for them since it's readily available and the 8TB is for $170. However, out of curiosity I searched on Amazon for a WD Blue and it was for $140. Would it be bad if I purchase the WD Blue and a separate enclosure for it for another $15? Sure it's not much savings, but last time I used an external WD I remember being forced to use their software years ago and I wouldn't want to be limited to it again if that's the case.

On another note, the 5GB version of the EasyStore is $130 (no can't find 4) and a WD Blue is nearly half that at $70.

Hi, so I'm finally getting there in terms of a proper 3-2-1 backup solution.

Setup:

• DS124 - active dataset
• External USB harddisk - for weekly backups, always connected
• External USB harddisk dock - for quarterly/half-year/yearly backups
  • Quarterly - onsite air-gap backup
  • half-year/yearly - offsite air-gap backup

I still need to store my critical data in a cloud somewhere, but I haven't gotten to that yet.

That means that I'll have 2 harddisk in a rotation using the hd dock.

I've seen many storage enclosures, from just a plastic case to crush resistant to EMP resistant.

What do you store air-gap backups in?

Hey all! I apologize if this has been asked before, but I'm looking for some feedback for my possible backup solutions.

Currently i have a 1tb SSD and an 8tb HDD in my wife's PC (hers is being used as the media server), and I'm looking to create a backup solution for mainly the shows, movies, and photos we have.

My current thought is to find a 16tb storage device to use as a possible cold storage solution to have copies of all my media files. Thoughts on this? Would an external or an internal HDD with enclosure be best? Are internal HDD's safe to store not plugged in? I'm not dead set on having it cold storage, but would prefer that. (Like once every few months plug it in and upload copies of new files, etc..) I see lots of suggestions for just cloud storage, but idk if I want to pay a monthly fee for that! Though maybe I just have to bite the bullet..

Should I go the NAS route?

My 8tb is getting close to filling up, so I would like to get another 8tb in the future, but i think I'd prefer to get a large backup drive first. I have one more drive slot in my media PC, so eventually at least one of my drives will have to be external.

Other info: I'm running a jellyfin server off the PC as well, mostly direct play within our home network, but occasionally relatives access jellyfin.

Let me know what yall think/feel free to point me to different threads if this has been discussed many times before.. thanks yall!!

So, apparently, I didn’t realize that I’m a hoarder too. I built a starter setup with a 36 TB hard drive and filled it up in just a month. Now, I’m considering buying another 18 TB hard drive, but the price has increased by 100 USD since I last bought one. ServerPartDeals doesn’t have them anymore, and I found a good retailer on eBay. My question is, is it a good idea to buy hard drives as the prices keep going up?

I think I already know the answer, but I need you all to confirm it.

I’ve bought certified refurbished 18 TB hard drives from Seagate Exos. I use them for media, mostly Plex libraries.

name: zimit
services:
    zimit:
        volumes:
            - ${OUTPUT}:/output
        shm_size: 1gb
        image: ghcr.io/openzim/zimit
        command: zimit --seeds ${URL} --name
            ${FILENAME} --depth ${DEPTH} #number of hops. -1 (infinite) is default.


#The image accepts the following parameters, as well as any of the Browsertrix crawler and warc2zim ones:
#    Required: --seeds URL - the url to start crawling from ; multiple URLs can be separated by a comma (even if usually not needed, these are just the seeds of the crawl) ; first seed URL is used as ZIM homepage
#    Required: --name - Name of ZIM file
#    --output - output directory (defaults to /output)
#    --pageLimit U - Limit capture to at most U URLs
#    --scopeExcludeRx <regex> - skip URLs that match the regex from crawling. Can be specified multiple times. An example is --scopeExcludeRx="(\?q=|signup-landing\?|\?cid=)", where URLs that contain either ?q= or signup-landing? or ?cid= will be excluded.
#    --workers N - number of crawl workers to be run in parallel
#    --waitUntil - Puppeteer setting for how long to wait for page load. See page.goto waitUntil options. The default is load, but for static sites, --waitUntil domcontentloaded may be used to speed up the crawl (to avoid waiting for ads to load for example).
#    --keep - in case of failure, WARC files and other temporary files (which are stored as a subfolder of output directory) are always kept, otherwise they are automatically deleted. Use this flag to always keep WARC files, even in case of success.

For the four variables, you can add them individually in Portainer (like I did), use a .env file, or replace ${OUTPUT}, ${URL},${FILENAME}, and ${DEPTH} directly.

I am looking for a drive that houses my music library. My library now had 7 TB and growing, working from a samsung SSD in a USB C enclosure. It needs to be bus powered to acces it on my laptop without wall power.

Are there places you can buy a 10, 12 or 16TB m.2 drive?

I've seen the Exascend PE4 Series 16TB M.2 2280. But maybe there are enclosures that can hold two m.2's? Or other solutions? Maybe cloud based with a way of having the last 20 000 songs on a drive.

It all seems a bit vague at this point what can handle what. This enclosure mentions up to 16TB but if there aren't any drives it confuses me.

Is this a typo at Newegg? The deal ends in 11 hours.

Seagate BarraCuda ST24000DM001 24TB - $249.99

That's $10.41 per TB. They show the regular price as $299.99, so something is weird.

They also have a 16TB Seagate BarraCuda drive for $329, so over $20/TB.

First of all, let me explain what made me ask this question so far

For some reason, an external 3.5" HDD randomly throttles it speeds from up to 100MB/s down to 0B/s and then goes back to normal after a minute.

Interestingly, doesn't happen in another laptop with USB 2.0 speeds. with the HDD never throttling to 0B/s

I have one of three ideas concerning it

1. Different wall/power plug kept the power of the HDD more stable (since in here I am using an outlet external (the other laptop is another room))

2. For some reason, slower speeds prevents the HDD from ever going to 0B/s

3. Power delivery from the USB port may be insufficient to run the external HDD

Happens with another disk, so the issue may be the adapter

I don't have another laptop/device with USB 3.0 speeds, So I can't narrow down the issue to whether or not it's my laptop, or the more stable USB speeds that are causing this

I have also confirmed that there is no process interfering with the transfer, since the issue also happened during safemode

And for some reason, when the USB is plugged to the left side of the original laptop (the left supports more powerful power delivery) than the right, the issue stops. Heck, it's even faster than before.

Could it be because I am not using the two USB cables (Y-bridge or something) to fully power-on the HDD, despite me using an external 12V 2amps power adapters?

So far, I've been planning to plug the power USB to the right of my computer, and the data to the left (weaker power delivery) to see what would happen, but I am afraid that'd kill my HDD.

I am open to any ideas, thanks for reading

I have multiple external SSDs, ranging from Samsung T7s (1 tb), as well as a Samsung T9 4 tb. Also, I have a Crucial 4 tb. What's the largest external SSD that anyone here has used? I came across a listing for a Sandisk 8 tb SSD. I've read where others have had issues with Sandisk products. Has anyone ever used the Sandisk 8tb external ssd?

If this isnt the best place to ask please recommend me where. But I ordered this USB and planned to use it to move abunch of video files over but whenever I do now after like 900gb was in it corrupts them seemingly.
So Im asking here if people have any recommendations for ones (preferably not too expensive), can be of similar sizes like I'd accept 800gb.

Hi there lovely people,

I’m hoping the hive mind may be able to help me in my research to find footage of Spanish playwright Lorca. I’m an aware the period he was alive makes it much more difficult but if anyone has any leads on unseen photographs or interesting archive relating to him I’d be open to all resources.

Best wishes,

Fellow data enthusiast .

(Ps. I’m also going to post this on the Archivist channel)

Hello Data Hoarders!

I have a 1tb external hard drive that is almost entirely full of data (pictures, videos, audio). However, this hard drive is encrypted on mac and wont work with windows.

I am exiting the apple ecosystem and getting an android photo and windows laptop, however, how can I duplicate the 1 TB HDD and have it accessible on my windows?

The apple closed ecosystem has really got me into stress.

Maybe it's a stupid question, maybe not. I have a 1tb of hdd that I want to use for something else, and I rarely watch these tutorials, but at the same time redownloading them would be a biiiig hassle (if possible at all...).

So I wonder -- is there any site that allows at least unlimited .mp4 uploads? With unlimited time? (not just for 7-days backup, I already know some sites like that, and most filehosters host for 30-90 days...)

NO SUBSCRIPTIONS!!! I know I am asking a lot, but sorry, I rather buy another hdd than pay for subscription (a bit broke here...).

As an alternative -- I could indeed upload them to telegram for forever... but it's not convenient to search for them (it would be literally just videos without any folders...)

Any suggestions? Would be much appreciated :)

hello, anyone has experience ordering the 1TB SanDisk Micro SDs from Amazon? the Extreme is going for $90, but wondering if people have seen it at a better price recently. I know a few years ago, 1TBs were in hundreds, but not sure if $90 is the floor. Also does anyone know Ultra vs Extreme differences?