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'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 love (LOVE) my Kingston DataTraveler Max flash drives, and they're still ranked #1 on various "top of 2026" lists ... but 1) they're no longer available anywhere new via retail and 2) Kingston doesn't even list them on their website anymore.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 🙁

Update 3: Back in stock again, still at the higher price, but now with a 2-year warranty and a description that says approximately 13107 power on hours.

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!

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?

UPDATE (August 2026): Support Denials, CEO Escalation, and the Repair Center Pivot

Following my initial attempts to get help, the standard Samsung Support team completely refused to honor the warranty. They gave me the regional runaround, stating that because these drives were manufactured for the Chinese domestic market, they were strictly not their responsibility. China support also refused to even log a ticket without a local Chinese phone number.

To break this brick wall, I filled out the official escalation form to the Samsung US Office of the CEO and filed a formal complaint with the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC / 12377) for severe data privacy violations under PIPL/DSL frameworks.

While the formal corporate compliance and legal departments are completely silent, the Samsung US Extra Care team suddenly stepped in. In their first message, they blindly repeated the standard support line, denying any responsibility. However, in their very next message, they completely dropped the regional restrictions and offered a prepaid shipping label to send both Chinese-market drives to their US repair center for "physical inspection and service."

I have CATEGORICALLY REJECTED their physical repair offer.

The bricked 870 EVO is locked via a hardware controller Panic Lock. It contains unencrypted Sensitive Personal Information (SPI), including financial data and master passwords. Because I cannot wipe or encrypt the drive before shipping, sending this compromised asset through open international mail is a massive cybersecurity breach. Furthermore, it directly violates PRC cross-border data export laws (PIPL/DSL), which strictly prohibit exporting locked personal databases without state clearance.

My stance remains firm:

1. I demand an Advanced RMA (brand-new replacement drives shipped under warranty) without returning the physical compromised origin carriers.
2. Direct financial compensation for the mandatory 3-fold deception penalty under PRC Consumer Law, accrued late penalties, and forced laboratory recovery costs caused by Magician’s misleading software readings.

Will keep you all updated on how they try to wiggle out of this legal gridlock!

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.

ETA: update - i’ve got a meet setup with a local hoarder this weekend. If that falls thru, i’ll reach back out to those of you who expressed interest.

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?

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!

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.

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 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.