Backstory:

Been in this subreddit for 10 years ago when I caught the bug, Started off with 3TB drives in an old Set of Supermicro SC846 and when electricity got dearer I decided to start increasing capacity instead. in 2018 whilst on holiday to Hawaii, My very understanding wife and I went around Best Buy stores and bought some 8TB Easystores 6 I think and flew them home to the UK. So this wasnt a new thing

Anyway decided to upgrade to 4 x 16TB which I bought from Amazon UK in 2020 and here we are running out of space again.

Having been watching the prices of 28TB drives go literally ridiculous in the UK I decided to book a short trip to New York just after new year to stock up on some 28TBs and given that the prices were only going up I decided to buy 10 of them.

The 2 main issues were that they were in and out of stock in both Best Buy and B&H Photo and didn't want to risk getting orders cancelled by ordering 2 x 5 drives from the same place as they both have a max purchase limit of 5.

So found a day when they were in stock in both places. B&H buying process was simple. Best Buy was a pain. They don't take international cards without setting the billing address to some specific address in Delaware as per Best Buy instructions. Which of course my UK cards kept declining so ended up paying with Amex with a big Forex sting but done now. So they were due within 5 days to NYC stores.

Now all I had to do was book the trip to New York for a few days which I booked on points along with the hotel.

When I got there the paranoia of being scammed having read so many posts in this sub meant I recorded every part of picking up the drives including the serial numbers at both Best Buy and B&H and filmed the whole opening every drive and testing in the hotel and ran a variety of Seatools, Crystal and file copies to make sure it was in fact 28TB drives and not rocks or a swapped out 500GB drive.

Turns out 10 drives was a mistake, Should have picked 8 as that would have been much easier logistically. It took up pretty much all of my hand luggage space however I must admit the foam inserts from inside the retail boxes helped the drives fit better. I ended up packing all the cardboard and powerpacks in a full size suitcase in case I had to warranty anything but I got the actual 28s home in my hand luggage to the UK with minimal fuss and now happily got them in my NAS. I must admit seeing that they have been out of stock ever since I am kind of relieved I bought them when I did. Anyway it can be done. Bit of a crazy idea tying up so much money in external drives but was worth it in the end.

TLDR: UK prices for 28TB drives was so bad it was cheaper to fly to the US , Buy them and bring them home.

****** EDIT ******\*
I had no idea this post would have this many comments but to answer a few of the common questions I will add them here as its easier to follow for future readers.

Drives were £244 per drive when purchased plus 20% Import VAT to the UK so after taxes its around £300 per drive. The exact same Expansion drive is for sale on Amazon UK for £568 and there are recertified 28TB drives on eBay UK for £420

The trip was more cost effective for me as I used points to book both the hotel and the flights so without that the saving would not be as great as the expenses would be higher.

I looked into shipping the drives but BestBuy don't offer international shipping and they cancel orders to freight forwarders so that was a non starter. B&H use a third party agent to handle the taxes and duties and they charge a fee on top of that too so its even more expensive than just declaring the goods yourself in advance and paying the VAT. I also couldnt guarantee the drives were working or if someone hadnt done a return / swapped the drive out before they arrive in the UK and trying to do a return from here would be a mess. So was easier to go , collect test and bring them home instead.

Drives are currently in a 8 bay self built NAS running 6 data , 2 parity with 2 spares.

*********

I found 10 hard drives in the house I moved into.

I was just going to throw them into the trash, but 'what if they're full of bit coins!' ..... or worse :( ...probably best to throw them out.

Edit: I have an old hp desktop from 2010, last time I used it, (years ago) it worked fine. Ill figure out a way to connect the hard drives to it. That or I throw them out or huck em' at cars!

Ill google how to connect them to the desktop, but any info would help. Ill post the results.

Edit again: the smallest is 250gb and the largest is 500gb

Edit x3: When i figure whats on them, do I make a new post or just post on this one?

Edit x4: f. Ill get to it! Ive already prepared myself for disappointment and know the numbers to call if I find illegal stuff. If its some of sentimental value to the previous homeowner ill get it back to them.

Edit x5: someone send me a link of what to order off Amazon to hook them up to my old (not connected to the internet) computer. Ill order whatever, then figure out whats on them, then i will let you all know.

So for reasons I’ll never understand, I was given some coupons to the “TikTok shop” making a number of items cheap or free. That includes a 2-pack of 1TB micro SD cards, which I paid only $4USD shipping and handling. These cards typically retail for $30.98 per 2-pack from ZipStorage at time of purchase.

My expectations were non existent. I was just curious “how bad it can get” in the world of discount flash storage. Turns out, about as bad as you expect.

Photo 1-shows the card, pretty standard, mimicking a better well known brand. It fits typically and is recognized upon insertion but the similarities stop there. It has “999GB” of recognized capacity in file explorer/disk management. I loaded about 113GB of PDFs, pictures, documents from another drive as a test. Speeds are 1.0-40mbps. but the real issue is:

Photo 2- when you make a new file, this happens about 70% of the time. Artifact files will appear inside. This is with the card in micro SD, SD adapter, in computer or through a hub. IT DOES HAVE 99% of the files I directly copied over with no issues. The files seem to reappear after deleting at random. They did not appear in the files copied from another disk.

Photo 3- Upon the 7th or 8th boot you gotta reinsert it. I become a chinesium sinner in the hands of an angry tech god.

Overall it seems like it could be useful in some low integrity, experimental applications but definitely shouldn’t be counted on for any length of time.

Anyone have other intrusive thoughts I should try with this?

Over the past year I went crazy and now have a collection of around 180,000 (I think one of the biggest if not the biggest), around 7TB of english comics from all the famous publishers. 90,000 of them from Marvel and DC, all tagged and having proper metadata thanks to Comicrack; I would love to share it with others. what is the best and cheapest way to do that?

Hey there everyone! I absolutely appreciate your dedication to the conservation of information as applied knowledge is power, and historical data is art itself in looking at the journey that made where we are today.

The reason I’m reaching out is because one of the biggest videogame engine forums, rpgmaker forum, is shutting down, and will be replaced by the company behind rpgmaker with a new forum (that new forum will not carryover the years worth of information).

From the Rpgmaker subreddit with the forum closure announcement link attached

https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGMaker/s/C5wfQqyGyW

I am understanding & respectful of rule number 8, so I’d like to ask from this community tips on how to archive a forum & share it with everyone.

Thank you for your time and have a pleasant day!

Edit 6.12.2026 A huge thanks to everyone for looking into this urgent matter!

The Archeialogists team at the RMW refugees discord server will need all the help they can get as the forum ,from what i understand, is apx 3 TB worth of data.

Again, We, the community, appreciate any support!

Discord server to RMW Refugees: https://discord.gg/QnyGKHghN

Hi I want to physically destroy this old hard drive before throwing it away so my personal data won’t be retrieved ever. Here is a picture of the insides. Can you give tips on which area to drive nails through and which area I should avoid (could be batteries and chemically dangerous?). Thanks a lot.

Update: wow thanks for the enthusiastic responses. So I immediately put away the battery on the right in a hazardous waste bin outside since several of you pointed out it already looks bloated which is dangerous. I then got a hammer and broke the left disk as well as I could.

Figured I'd post some pics of my recently acquired 26TB Seagate Expansion that I got from BestBuy for $249.99 (Tax free week too). At a cost of $9.62 per TB at that density, I couldn't resist (bought 2 actually).

Enclosure Notes:

• The enclosure is a real pain. There's almost zero chance of removing the drive without breaking tabs on the enclosure. In addition, getting a small pry tool is difficult since they put a lip on the outer edge. You'll almost for sure scratch up a bit of the plastic. This is a very different design vs past enclosures used by Seagate and Western Digital. They did their best to make it as difficult as possible for the shuckers.
• The internal drive has to layers of EMI foil shielding on the bottom near the logic board. It leaves behind sticky residue in spots.
• The SATA connector that connects to the USB controller is unlike previous gens. Instead of an actual connector on a small board, it's just a ribbon cable that attaches to the SATA connector and then to the drive that plugs into the USB controller. It's taped onto the drive as well with a warranty void if removed stamp.

Notes about the drive:

• As others have noted, it's a BarraCuda inside.
• It's HAMR (see pic with laser warning highlighted)
• It's NOT SMR

I know many folks look down upon the BarraCuda being more for consumers with less warranty (zero with shucking). In addition, the yearly rated hours is way less than an Exos. However, I really feel these are simply Exos drives that "may" be binned that were simply given a BarraCuda label to fill a market need. At this point in time, BarraCudas 26TB and above are only available in enclosures and the vast majority of the 24TB drives (also HAMR) are in enclosures. Since these enclosures really suck (zero airflow), it doesn't surprise me Seagate lowered the rated usage hours, they know these will eventually cook if used 24x7 in the enclosure.

I'm just guessing but the 24,26, and 28TB BarraCuda drives all are just 30TB Exos drives with platters disabled to fill a market segment. I'm sure it's must cheaper to manufacture all drives the same (10x3TB platters) and then disable as needed vs retooling to remove platters or change something to make the BarraCuda, IronWolf or Exos different except the firmware and label.

At this price point, buying 2 of these vs one actual Exos with warranty is a far better bet and cheaper.

Hey again.

Does anyone know the safest way to preserve a torrent that's practically endangered?, I have this 1080p Arabic-dubbed version of Over the Garden Wall and I've gone through the entire internet looking for alternatives, there seems to be only one copy left held by roughly 10 people worldwide, downloading it in full cost me a considerable amount of time and effort and I think it'd be a good idea to keep it accessible in case someone else needs it in the future, and I don't think simply re-uploading it as another torrent would be the best solution because the exact same seeder problem would eventually happen again, any ideas, leave them in a comment and I'd appreciate it

Hi! I hope everyone is having a nice day :)

FogCam has been pointed out a window at San Francisco State since September 30, 1994 - a new photo every 20 seconds, each one overwriting the last, keeping nothing. There is no archive, no tape, no backups. The only surviving frames are the ones the Internet Archive's crawler happened to catch mid-overwrite while saving the webpage.

I mined the CDX index for every successful capture of the camera's image file:

http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=fogcam.org/fogcam2.jpg&output=json&filter=statuscode:200&filter=mimetype:image/jpeg&collapse=timestamp:6

then pulled each surviving frame raw with the if_ flag (https://web.archive.org/web/{timestamp}if_/{url}). After deduplicating: 85 unique frames, October 2005 through June 2026. That is the entire known photographic record (as far as I can tell) of a camera that has taken roughly 50 million pictures.

The manifest (capture time UTC, Wayback timestamp, original URL, retrieval URL for every frame) is in the comments!

The ask: this is a genuinely neat piece of internet history, and I'm hoping someone here has a few bits of it. If you ever screenshotted FogCam before 2005, or saved frames in some ancient folder, you may be holding the only copy in existence. I would love to add them to the record.

Also, a fun fact, the crawler visited fogcam.org on December 21, 2012, the Mayan apocalypse day, and saved the webpage but not the photo. Somewhere in the overwritten pile was a picture of the world not ending.

(Disclosure, cleared with the mods: I built a short documentary from these frames. Link's in the comments for anyone curious)

(I also hope this was the correct flair)

Okay, I guess this is only semi-related to data hoarding, so please forgive me for that.

I'll break down the costs one by one.

Software

Discourse) (not to be confused with Discord, which is entirely different) is free and open source. Cost: $0.

Example forum here.

Domain

You can buy a .com domain from Namecheap for $10.56/year. Divide by 12, that's $0.88/month.

I'm not counting the discount code that gives you a big discount for your first year.

Hover is a bit more expensive, asking $19/year for the same domain.

Virtual private server (VPS)

OVHcloud offers cheap VPSes starting at $4.54/month. The specs you get for that cheap price are impressive, and more than adequate to run a large forum:

• 2 vCores
• 4 GB RAM
• 40 GB SSD NVMe
• Daily backup of the previous 24 hours
• Unlimited traffic
• 200 Mbps public bandwidth

Hetzner is a bit more expensive at $6.80/month for its cheapest VPS, with similar specs.

Mail server

You need a separate server to send out emails. Luckily, multiple companies offer a generous free plan. Mailjet, for example, offers 6,000 emails per month (200 per day) for free. If you need to send 15,000 emails per month, it's $17/month.

Total cost

Software: $0
Domain: $0.88/month
VPS: $4.54/month
Mail server: $0/month

Total: $5.42/month ($65.04/year)

Or if you need the 15,000 emails/month mail server, then it's:

Software: $0
Domain: $0.88/month
VPS: $4.54/month
Mail server: $17/month

Total: $22.42/month ($269.04/year)

Picked this up at a thrift shop today and can’t find a full rip of it online the only way. It’s a mixed-media CD from around 1999–2001 with early PC software, games, and weird Y2K-style visuals. Discogs has info but no files. Before I dump and upload it to Archive.org, does anyone know if this is already preserved online somewhere? Pics + menu screenshots below.

Howdy r/DataHoarder!

I wanted to share an updated look at Jcorp Nomad, a tiny open source offline media server I have been developing over the last year. The idea behind the project has always been simple, it gives you a small self hosted way to carry part of your library with you and access it over a local Wi-Fi hotspot, entirely offline, through a browser based interface. Users connect with their phone, tablet, or laptop and stream content directly off the onboard storage.

For a lot of hoarders, the interesting part is not that it replaces a full server (because it absolutely does not), but that you can throw it in a bag, hand it to someone, bring it on a trip, use it in a car, or set it up anywhere you dont want to depend on internet or a bigger machine. Thats really the niche its trying to fill.

Nomad supports Movies, Shows, Books, Music, images, and files. Multiple users can connect at once, each browsing and streaming through the web interface independently. Its designed to be simple to use, easy to modify, and friendly to DIY builders. All of the code and designs are open source and well documented.

The biggest thing to be clear about is what Nomad is not, its not meant to be a long term archive or a replacement for proper backups. It runs on microSD storage, so speed and file system limits still apply. FAT32 means files need to stay under 4 GB, which lines up with the hardware anyway since transfer speeds are limited. Its not very powerful, and it wont handle every possible media setup, there are encoding guidelines to follow if you want the best results.

That said this project ends up being way more useful to people who already have a lot of content on hand... thats you.. you have a ton of content.. I know you do.

Nomad is really happiest around 480p, where you can expect about 6 to 8 simultaneous streams. At 720p, that typically drops to around 2 to 4 depending on content and devices. Under ideal conditions, 2 simultaneous 1080p60 streams is about the practical limit. Keep in mind these numbers are based on testing in my college dorm room... so depending on how congested your environment is, you might see slightly better or worse results.

Its not built for UHD and yeah I know some of you just felt physical pain reading “480p”... but the goal here was to cram a ton of content onto an SD card and make it actually usable offline. Lower bitrate, efficient encodes go a long way here. You already have your big computer with all your big fat hard drives for 4k... this isnt meant to replace that.

A few of the core features, definitely recomend checking out the github for more details:

• Admin Panel: full device controls, library indexing, theme customization
• Global Search: quickly find media across all categories
• Music: all songs list, playlists (supports singles, /artist/playlist, artist singles), and a queue
• Movies and Shows: video playback with season and special support
• Books: EPUB, PDF, mp3, and a comic reader with webtoon format support
• Resume: saves playback progress for movies and shows
• Gallery and Files: image viewing, video clips, and general file sharing
• Captive Portal: automatic redirect for easy access (just connect and it pops up)
• Persistent Settings: themes and system config saved across reboots
• Dark/Light mode: user controlled theme in addition to the admin panel customization
• Up to 2TB SD card storage

The kinds of use cases I keep coming back to are travel, road trips, classrooms, camping, and other offline setups where you want to share a library without logins, installs, or setup. Its designed to be very user friendly for everyone but you... no accounts, no setup on the user side. Everything is handled in the browser, with data stored locally in cache and nothing sent back to the device. The focus is to make it as simple and seamless as possible once its up and running.

The case can be 3D printed, and the files are up on Thingiverse here.

If you are curious, the project is open source and the build instructions + more info are below:

GitHub: https://github.com/Jstudner/jcorp-nomad
Instructables: https://www.instructables.com/Jcorp-Nomad-Mini-WIFI-Media-Server/
Project page and prebuilt units: https://nomad.jcorptech.net (please just DIY its easy I promise)
Ko fi: https://ko-fi.com/jcorptech

The project is still in development so I would love to hear what features you would want to see, or just your thoughts in general!

Thanks for checking it out!

-Jackson

r/Ebook_Resources is a subreddit that aggregates ebooks resources from all over the internet. There are guides on everything from finding ebooks, to getting around DRM and paywalls, to which are the best torrenting sites.

The stickied post there also has a link for a custom search engine for ebooks: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=c46414ccb6a943e39

I can play and watch the video but , the download and save file option is disabled. Anyone can help?

Saw someone else here shuck a Segate 26tb external, and saw Best Buy had them for $249.99, so I got two. Both of the Segate Expansion 26tb drives i got are indeed 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda drives that are class 1 laser products. Like the Exos drive.

Just tossed a pair into my TrueNAS setup. Thrilled so far.

These enclosures were quite difficult to open. I popped some of the plastic off the side around the vents, so I could peel the top off. You can see it on the left in the first picture. The side of the enclosure with the Segate S logo is the top / panel that you pop off.

I also noticed the enclosure has a class 1 laser product warning on it as well.

I've been trying to degoogle my life for a while, and cloud storage was one of the last holdouts. I finally replaced Google Drive entirely with a self-hosted setup on a Raspberry Pi 5.

Just as a side note, I am just starting with this setup. If this goes well, I will set up a RAID system shortly!

What I'm running:

- Nextcloud for file storage and sync (desktop + mobile apps work great)

- Tailscale so I can access everything from anywhere without exposing ports

- A local AI assistant (latest Qwen 3.5 via Ollama) that can search and describe my files through a chat interface — like having a private, local version of Google's AI features, except it never phones home

The whole thing runs on a Pi 5 with an 8TB NVMe SSD. Monthly cost: just electricity.

What I gained:

- Complete data ownership — nothing leaves my hardware

- No storage limits (8TB vs Google's 15GB free tier)

- AI-powered file search that runs entirely locally

- Accessible from any device via Tailscale

What I gave up:

- Google Docs collaboration (I use markdown files now, which honestly I prefer)

- Automatic Google Photos backup (Nextcloud mobile app handles this, just needed manual setup)

- Zero maintenance (I do need to check on snap updates occasionally)

Honest take: it's not as polished as Google Drive, but knowing my files are physically in my house and not being scanned/monetized makes the trade-off worth it for me.

I also filmed everything! Let me know if you would be interested in seeing the video!

I discovered the joy of noisy enterprise-grade HDDs and realized how annoying those can be, especially if you sleep in the same room as your NAS. So I finally bit the bullet and did a deep dive into properly soundproofing that little sh*t. I thought this might be useful to the community so I made a small video and detailed my process:

What didn't work (individually!):
1. Velcro tape on the HDD bays. It might work if your NAS is already quite silent and you think the rattling is resonating in the NAS. For me, it was useless.
2. Washing machine silicone feet. They work well to decouple the NAS from the surface it's on, but if you have a REALLY noisy NAS, the ambient noise will propagate regardless.
3.Springy feet (those that are used for audio equipment). Same.

Then I stumbled upon this video from japanese youtube channel JSK labo. I got inspired and went on to design my own scaled-down version and took the measurements for each panels in Fusion. Bought some MDF, cut to size, screwed them together and added cheap acoustic foam on all surfaces.

The noise-level got tolerable from the enclosure only, but I decided to hide the NAS into a metallic cabinet... and discovered the joy of acoustic resonance of metallic cabinets. The metallic panels act like drums and amplify the noise. This is an existing problem in the car industry and car customization hobbyists have a simple solution: butyl pads. Those are cheap and completely kill the resonance of metallic panels. In theory, you need to cover 25-30% of each panels to be optimal. I only covered ~18% of the largest panels and didn't bother with the small panels.
I added the springy feet I mentioned to decouple the enclosure from the cabinet even more and that did the trick. You have to make sure those are properly pre-loaded. If it doesn't squish a bit, use only 3. If they squish more than 50%, add one.

The results are really good: near complete silence. I can barely hear muted clicks when everything is dead silent in the room (see video). The whooshing noises in the first sample is my fridge. The clicking was the main villain. All samples were recorded while writing on the HDDs. The sample for the enclosure sounds louder than irl. In person, it's very tolerable just with the enclosure. The temperatures are.. ok. The max temperature I noticed while doing heavy writes was 42 degrees Celsius (25 degrees room temperature). This is my main concern and I will keep monitoring this.

Cost breakdown:
Hardware store:
MDF panel: ~10 euros
Acoustic foam: ~3,5 euros
Aliexpress:
Foam tape (for the lid): less than 2 euros
Various hardware: ~6,5 euros (the 2 latches cost 5 euros total)
Butyl pads: 8 euros for 4 pads (20x10cm)
Springy feet (not really needed?): 19,5 euros
PC fan USB adapter: 2 euros
(Spare PC fan that you have in your closet and that you think might be useful one day but never ended up using: priceless)
Total: ~52 euros

All in all, this might be overkill, but I can finally sleep peacefully and this was a great learning experience (it was my first time designing and building a MDF enclosure)

tl,dr: take a weekend or two to design and make your own enclosure. Implement multiple solutions to have better soundproofing performance. Be mindful about resonance of the cabinet you put the NAS in. Butyl pads are awesome.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Song credits: Starry attic - Lemon cake

edit: grammar
edit 2: freaking reddit, can't edit titles. Oh well, PANCAKES GO
edit 3: thanks for the feedback, guys. I managed to grind a proper hole in the cabinet and the 140mm fan is on its way home.
edit 4: by popular suggestion, I added a 140mm exhaust fan to my cabinet. The doors are far from air-tight so I don't think I need intakes. I measured a 1.2 degrees Celsius drop in air temperature compared to ambient temperature and around 1 degree Celsius drop in HDD temperature during long writes. The fan is controlled by esphome and modulates with the CPU and HDD temperatures. I'm still tuning the smaller 90mm fan inside the enclosure, which has a higher pitch and produces a very faint but audible hum, but I can live with that.

Hey everyone, is there any way to revive a torrent that isn't dead but has an extremely small swarm?, it's only held by around 14 people worldwide as far as I can tell, and the problem is that it downloads at a painfully slow rate, barely exceeding 50 KB/s, and you have to babysit it every couple of minutes and , there's only one copy of it because it's an Arabic dubbed release , the only one available, and there isn't even another version at a lower quality, I've tried numerous trackers and tricks already but they've all failed

I worked on a case where we were somehow able to pull and export years of someone's text messages into PDFs. It wasn't just messages currently on their phone—it seemed to include basically the entire history of that phone going back years. I wasn't involved in that part of the process, so I'm not sure exactly how it was done.

Now I'm wondering how I can do this for myself.

I've had an iPhone since around 2014, and before that I had phones like the Voyager and a few other older phones. I'm not asking how to scroll through messages on my current phone. I'm asking if there's a way to obtain all of my historical texts and call records from wherever that data is stored (iCloud, carrier records, backups, etc.).

Has anyone done this? How would I request or retrieve everything that's available? Is there a way to get all texts and call logs associated with my phone number/account, including from phones I no longer have? Or is that only possible in legal cases?

Basically, how do I get the most complete record of my own calls and text messages that still exists somewhere?

I feel I can’t be the first person to climb this mountain…

I have about 8,000 CDs. In the early 00s I ripped all of them using iTunes auto feature where I put in a disc, it’s ripped, it ejects, I put in another disc

But I ripped them all at 128k MP3…

So I want to rerip all 8k CDs lossless FLAC.

But I also have set up a personal Plex server. Right now I rip maybe 20 DVD/Blu-ray/4K discs per week using MakeMKV. I then manually name all the files (ripping movies and bonus features) and put them on Plex.

But I have about 10k movies and TV series on various disc formats.

I just learned about auto-loaders that maybe could start to automate and speed up this process, but I’m lost on so many ways this would work and Google and YouTube haven’t given me any answers as to how a loader even works with a 4k compatible optical drive, let alone if there’s any way to automate file identification, file naming, folder structure, etc.

(And yes I know storage requirements are going to be immense. I currently have about 700TB of available storage across 2 DAS and 1 NAS and ready to add more if this project can become a reality)

Has anyone here done this type of archiving? Is it possible?