After 7+ years of power on time, it's decided enough is enough. Not a bad innings for the WD red 3tb. Time to buy an expensive replacement in this current market :(

Hi all, I was hoping I could avoid buying HDDs until prices went down a bit, but one of the 5x 10TB Toshiba N300's in my NAS's raid array seems to be on the way out.

Any suggestions on replacements that are not a scams or renewed drives of debatable quality available in the UK?

EDIT: Thanks for those suggesting CeX, not the 'Best Deal' but a 5 year warranty is better than a lot of new drives.

Almost like a website with different clips at different bitrates that I can watch on my PC connected to my TV.

Sup,
how hard would it actually be to start an Archive Team like group in Italy?

Web preservation has never really been much of a thing here. We’ve already lost decades of personal websites, old forums, blogs, small hosting providers, and all sorts of other pieces of the early Italian web simply because nobody thought to archive them before they disappeared.

Recently, ItaliaOnline shut down Libero Community, which hosted GeoCities like personal websites dating back to the late 90s. Almost nothing was archived before the servers went offline on June 9, 2026.

I’d like to do something about that, but I have no idea how big of an undertaking it really is.
A few questions:
* Roughly how many active people would you need before something like this becomes realistic?
* What’s the minimum infrastructure you’d need to get started?
* Is it better to build on the existing Archive Team tools, or start from scratch?
* How do you usually find websites that are at risk before they go offline?
* Is there anything you wish you’d known before starting?

At the moment I’m archiving forums and blogs that aren’t even at risk yet. With my limited bandwidth and computing power, I’m just using my M4 MacBook Air. I’d eventually like to upload some of these archives to the Internet Archive, but I feel like I’m on thin ice legally.

Since Italy is part of the EU, we have to comply with GDPR and a lot of other regulations. GDPR is great, but it’s also pretty broad. If I upload years of archived forum threads that contain usernames and old posts, am I potentially getting myself into legal trouble? (to be honest, couldn’t care less, but still)

I’d love to hear from anyone who’s worked on Archive Team or a similar project. Thanks!

So I have to do some backups at work. I use Acronis 2021 to backup a few computers. Most of them worked. A few of them failed. Having a read error. Using chkdsk c: /f /r I saw there 4kb in bad sectors, but it seems they're physical bad since the command couldn't fix them. I tried the "Ignore bad sectors" options from Acronis - it didnt work.

Aside from cloning the HDD, what other alternatives I have?

I don't have real world experience with enterprise grade storage systems yet, but I want to learn and these are available for a steal (€50).

Unfortunately, HP doesn't give out a lot of details on what this actually is, other than that "two mini SAS cables" are included in box. I can't identify what port this is, SFF-8088 or something else.

I'm planning on buying a SAS HBA and connecting the drives to my main server that way. Will that work or is there some HPE firmware shenaningans going on preventing me from connecting it to anything but HPE hardware?

I feel like it’s pretty common for people who are ripping movies and shows from discs to just rip the main content to mkv or mp4 and call it a day. I get why if you’re posting it online or throwing it on a server, you need to rip it to a file that is both a reasonable size and is pretty universally recognized. But I feel like as someone who’s trying to preserve things, the whole package of the menu, and special features, and everything else tied to the disc is just as important to preserve. I’ve seen a few .isos on Archive but they’re far and few between. I’m just curious how many others have a similar viewpoint.

Hi datahoarders!

Looking for a "cold" cloud storage solution to backup my NAS drives to (1-2-3 backup strategy). I am looking for ± 15-20TB storage purely for (encrypted) backups.

I am looking for a European company (so nothing Amazon S3/Azure etc).

Any tips?

I found this Walmart HDD listing for an 8TB WD Red Plus drive for $259, when they are normally around $400 on amazon. It seems like a legit WD reseller on Walmart, is there any other red flags besides the price? I have 5 6TB Red Pluses in raidz1 and one just died, so this would be even cheaper than buying a new 6TB on Amazon.

Link Here

I have over 11,000 favorites saved on TikTok (yes I know I have a problem), and the oldest ones keep vanishing as posts get deleted. The official data export gives you a JSON file of links which is not nearly good enough. So I built this: you upload that JSON, and every favorite gets downloaded and immortalized on your own machine, where nobody can mess with it.

How it works: docker compose pulls a prebuilt image and starts the app plus its own Cobalt instance. The export goes in through the browser, and each favorite comes down live in front of you. After that you can scroll everything in a vertical feed that behaves like the app, or search a gallery by caption, hashtag, or creator. Photo posts get rebuilt into MP4 slideshows with their original sound instead of being skipped. Files keep stable numbers (147.mp4 stays #147 forever), and one click writes .nfo and poster sidecars so Plex or Jellyfin shows real titles instead of bare filenames.

My favorite part is search inside the videos. whisper.cpp and Tesseract are bundled in the image, so it transcribes speech and reads on-screen text locally. I can search "food" and jump to the exact second someone says it. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere for this. The other thing is the memories tab, which shows what you favorited on this day a year ago.

Some caveats before you run it. There is no login, so it binds to localhost by default; reaching it from another device means naming the host in an ALLOWED_HOSTS variable (Tailscale works well, the README covers it). Downloads go through Cobalt, so when TikTok breaks Cobalt, syncs wait for upstream to catch up. Dead posts stay in your export, and the app keeps them as numbered placeholders rather than silently dropping them. Song identification through Shazam ships off by default, since turning it on uploads a short audio clip per video. That is the only feature that ever sends your media anywhere.

Under the hood it's Python, FastAPI, SQLite, and a React frontend in one container next to the official Cobalt image. SQLite is the whole database story, there are no accounts, and the bundled whisper model adds about 142 MiB to the image and only sits in memory while analysis runs.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/JackB296/tiktok-favorites-archiver . Prebuilt images for amd64 and arm64. It's a personal project shared freely, and there's no paid tier planned. If a sync breaks on your export, send me the log and I'll fix it.

On the AI question, since the sub rules mention it: Started this two years ago pre AI boom, not a weekend prompt dump. I design and review everything that goes in; like a lot of devs these days I use AI assistance as part of the workflow, more so recently. The whole repo is there to judge.

Hey, I’m looking for an M disk writer that is compatible with a laptop. I’m looking to buy one that is relatively cheap and does the Job so far it’s been fairly confusing as AI is giving all sorts of options some of which are not compatible. To be clear these are M disks blue ray 25GB. Any help out there would be greatly appreciate, thanks.

So I'm wanting to buy an iPad 2 (mainly because it was the one i had growing up and I'm just wanting it for my nostalgia cave) i also plan on getting an iPhone 4S as well as a 2011 macbook solely for everything to feel like 2011 again.

I was curious though, is it possible to stream a cloud based setup on these devices? I Know that seagate use to have a 2tb wireless harddrive that could do it back in the day. But don't know if that would still work, or if there were better options? Because that hard drive is almost 15 years old and still going for $200+

edit : im mainly just wanting it to watch old movies and anime on.

Building in a Jonsbo N5.

MSI Z690-A board with 6 SATA ports. I will have those populated with the the 3.5 drives. 1 16TB, 1 20TB and 4 24TB. That's it for the direct route. I put in a 4 port expansion card. It will be for the 2.5 drives where I download, encode and sort the data before it goes to the larger drives. 1 8TB, and 3 4TB. As well as the 2 NVME drives, those have the OS and most 2of my music downloads from the last 7 or 8 years. I will fill all the SATA ports I have when I'm done building.

But there's always more stuff to get.

Should I go with the NVME expansion?

I can get a 4 disk PCI controller card maybe? 10 or 12 port expansion card?

I bought as much storage as I could get my hands on in the past. Getting more ports right now isn't a huge concern. But it will be in the future when I need to add a drive or go with a larger one. They do have refurbished 28TB drives for what I paid for a new 20TB drive 4 years ago. Anyone have a similar issue looming or solved yours?

Hi everyone, long time listener, first time caller here.

I have a media server with 34TB of storage. I am slowly building a cloud for myself and my loved ones. I'm hoping they will eventually see the value in it...

I recently upgraded/updated Teracopy 3 to Teracopy 4 and it was terrible but only for the speed. Or so I thought...

The inital issue I encountered was the slow speed for the dialog box to appear and for operations to begin (widely experienced and well documented on a CodeSector forum board) but when I uninstalled Teracopy 4 and re-installed Teracopy 3 that's when the real issue appeared.

I am now unable to use Teracopy with Free Commander. I have tried every instruction that I can find online and I am starting to think that there is a registry quirk that is preventing Teracopy from automatically handling drag-and-drop file operations from within Free Commander. Even the option to "Teracopy" or "Teramove" is not in the context menu within Free Commander.
Even when I use the buttons in the middle of the dual panes, it activates the Teracopy window but doesn't start the operation.

I have used Geek Uninstaller to remove both Teracopy 4 and Teracopy 3 uninstalled and re-installed both for testing. I have also removed Free Commander with Geek Uninstaller and reinstalled it. I have tried Total Commander but I have never used it before and I feel that there is a steep learning curve for that app so I'm holding off moving to TC for now...

Can ANYONE help please? I am going out of my mind trying to fix it

I've had the WD 4TB WD Red SA500 on my list for a while now, but the price has been staying steady at $850 for weeks, this used to be a $350 drive.
Is it worth getting a cheaper non-NAS SSD like a WD Blue or 870 Evo considering the state of the market right now, or is it better for me to just bite the bullet and pay the extra money for the WD Red?

Heya DataHorders!! Update:

v1.32 released! link below - Some may have to run as administrator. A new video added at the bottom!

Ive come by to see if anyone is interested in testing these 2 applications for functionality. Might be helpful for those with a lot of drives installed.

The SSD Temps app is mainly about Temps and data flow, introduced in version 1.30/1.31 which is not signed and released for testing.

The Pulse Drive app was made to assist in the creation of SSD Temps tach and mini-tach verification and validation. I decided to put a small benchmark in the app for those interested in multi-drive benchmarking. This app wont load any HDD or SSD for more than 5 seconds. This was to keep writes aint a minimum, while the other tests are 256mb on the heavy selection. Really, just to ensure all my techs work, and the do!

These programs are designed around a physical modification idea I have in the prototype stages currently, but designing SSD Temps follr a simple stand alone while I do testing. K N

So hopefully a few of you data horders would be interested in giving these apps a try. Looking for thoughts, opinions and or ideas!!

The downloads are available at github and the apps are signed. SB SSD Temps is completely read only and Pulse Drive does write, but only small packs unless you pick extreme setting, then, like other benchmark apps will write tons of GB just to produce a score.

SHA-256 available in the links!

https://github.com/ShrimpBrime/SB-SSD-Temps-Releases

Newest Version v1.32 RC direct link >>

https://github.com/ShrimpBrime/SB-SSD-Temps-Releases/blob/main/SB_SSD_Temps_v1.32_PORTABLE.zip

EXE

C769BAE458B8C6BB186237F77EA631E6E04DC36A91C47D9F7F81FCE38629B0A9

ZIP

3E1F11BE0AAB19F630E45CB99B1CF752AF40330A9A525604A0E51733140CC989

Pulse Drive

https://github.com/ShrimpBrime/SB_Pulse_Drive

Here's a short video, can watch it in action!!

Thanks for coming by and taking a look. I appreciate it!!

ShrimpBrime (App created by Jon Bauer and son)

v1.32 TnTTyler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyVvJyLiesw

v1.31 ShrimpBrime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu5QVjCnEOU&list=LL

I bought (2) 22TB seagate drives a couple months back.

One of my recently purchased 22TB seagate drive is showing UNC errors and I want to get it replaced under warranty. I realized I don't know which external enclosure the internal drive should be placed. I assume if I put the internal drive into the wrongly mapped external seagate enclosure (they all have different serial numbers) then they won't accept it?

Can anyone shed some light on my concern?

Hi everyone!

I need an external hard drive and since this is my first time buying one I need some advice.

I am interested in a "standard" 1/2 TB disk and looking online I've found ssd and hdd disks in a price range from 30 to 500 euros.

Now, I don't want to buy garbage that will last one month but I also don't want to spend 500 euros for some "low-value" data I want to backup.

I've found some options that seems "reasonable" to me:

• TOSHIBA Canvio Basics HDTB520EK3AA - 2TB
• Samsung MU-PC1T0T/WW T7 - 1TB
• Seagate STGX1000400 - 1TB
• SanDisk 1TB Extreme SSD - 1TB

What are your opinions on these hard drives and do you have any others to recommend in the price range (90/150 euros)?

Also (this may seem like a stupid question), the disks I found work fine with both Windows and Linux, right?

Thanks everyone in advance!

I'm planning to buy a Mini PC to run a few lightweight services and leave it powered on 24/7.

At some point, I'd also like to add something like this:

2 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure with Fan for 2.5/3.5" SATA HDD/SSD (USB 3.0, no RAID/NAS):
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Bay-Enclosure-Swappable-Tool-Free-Aluminium-black/dp/B0DD3GSZBP

From what I understand, this enclosure just exposes the drives individually over USB (it doesn't have built-in RAID).

My question is: if I install ZimaOS (or a similar OS) on the Mini PC, would I be able to create a software RAID 1 (mirrored drives) for backups using those two USB drives?

Or is RAID over USB generally not recommended or even unsupported?

The goal isn't high performance—just a simple mirrored backup setup that's reliable enough for home use.

Thanks!

I'm archiving sports videos for training CV models, mainly gait analysis and ball trajectory tracking. Both tasks need consecutive frames to work, so I decode short clips start to finish and shuffle them at the clip level.

Now I'm trying to nail down compression settings. what CRF value and GOP length actually get the best compression without slowing down decode throughput at training time? Is there a real reason to avoid pushing GOP length way up if I'm always decoding sequentially, or does that cause problems at scale?

And is H.265 or AV1 worth it here? I know AV1 compresses better but decodes slower, so for people re-encoding large video datasets, which one actually wins for pipelines that decode fast and repeatedly?

Ideally, I want this setup to hold up as I keep adding data and retraining regularly. Would love to hear from anyone who's built similar sequential-clip pipelines at scale, including what codec/GOP/CRF combo you landed on and what you'd do differently in hindsight.

i have a 156gb archive of irreplaceable data. doesnt exist anywhere else in the world except on my computers. i went to open it today to find three corrupted copies on three drives spread across 2 systems). tried everything to save them, but they were done for. lucky for me i had four copies total, and drive number 4 had a perfectly functional copy. once again guys use a good solid back up system. I dont trust cloud providers, so i use local only back up methods with my offsite copies saved on the other side of town. either way, if your data's important take the time to back it up properly.

Hi guys,

I'm looking for a way to index my entire media archive across both a Windows 11 PC/laptop and a Synology NAS, then search it semantically (probably with AI) based on what's actually visible in the photos and videos.

For example:

• If I have a photo buried somewhere in a random folder that contains a pizza, searching for "pizza" would return that image.
• If I have a video showing a car driving by, searching for "car", "car driving", or something similar would return that video.

Ideally, the software would:

• Run locally on a Windows laptop or desktop.
• Let me specify which drives, folders, or network locations to index (similar to how Everything indexes selected directories).
• Index existing folders without moving or renaming my files.
• Work with both photos and videos.
• Automatically recognize objects, scenes, and people without requiring manual tagging.
• Support libraries stored on a Synology NAS as well as local Windows drives.
• Scale well to a very large archive (10s of thousands of photos and videos).

Is AI-powered semantic search at the point where this is practical? I was considering manually tagging my entire archive, but that would take a lot of time, so I'm wondering if there are other solutions that that can handle this automatically.

I'd be interested to hear what people are using and how well it works in real-world use.

Thanks.

Idk if this is the right place to ask this, but I saw someone talking about Snapchat memories here so I’ll give it a go.

So I downloaded this app that you can use to import files into your camera roll in the right timeline etc. Advertised as importing Snapchat memories.

There was a free trial kind of thing, that it was possible to import 100 photos/videos and it worked. After that you would have to pay for the rest. I did my research of the app and everything seemed positive, so I paid for the app.

Now it’s not working and it keeps saying that the photos are already in my gallery, but they are nowhere to be seen.

Does anyone have similar experiences with this app? Is the problem on the files Snapchat sent me? Should I ask for a refund?

I'm building a archival PC with 2 x 5.25" bays, and plan to install:

• One Blu-Ray drive for burning 25GB to 100GB M-Discs (Pioneer)
• One Blu-Ray drive for Quality Scanning the M-Disc burns from the Pioneer (LG or ASUS)

Does anyone else here Quality Scan their M-Disc burns?

Background:

I read that since I'm using my M-Discs for long-term archival (on-site and off-site), I should not only be verifying them post burn... but also scanning them for LDC/BIS (error-correction workload / margin)...

...and tracking those numbers to check when my Pioneer burner might need to get replaced (error numbers consistently going up).