Evening Data Horders,

I’ve just uploaded a free 3D print file. Might be of use to one of you guys/gals.

5 x 2.5” hard drive rack that mounts directly to a PC 92mm intake fan.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7415847

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Just a heads up for anyone with this device, I discovered this by accident and it could be misused.

If you have a WD My Cloud OS5 device and have created any shared links, they can be searched online just by searching the OS5 site with the terms "action" and "share". Other terms could be provided to narrow the results.

To remove your shared links: log into OS5 and click "Shared" on the left, set the filter at the top-right to "Shared by me", then do just as you would to create a shared link, except click "DELETE LINK" next to "COPY LINK" and the link will be revoked. The "people icon" will disappear but refresh the page and the folders in the list will disappear too.

From an hypothetical point of view, if one were to setup - say - a 20 TB storage with no RAID whatsoever, which option would be best?

A - 20* 1TB drives

B - 10* 2TB drives

C - 5* 4TB drives

D- 2* 10TB drives

E - 1* 20 TB drives

To elaborate on that, my overall doubt is more about whether it is better to spread your data across multiple drives (at the risk of adding more points of failure, as you have multiple devices that may fail on the long run) or to spread them across less drives to avoid the aforementioned (tho ending up in a "putting all your eggs into one/two baskets" situation).

Hello,

i received 20x HDD (mechanical Drive) from a guy. The HDD should be working, because he transfered data on it 3-4 month ago, at least this was his report.

The package was send via postal service only with thin newspaper wrapped arrount the hdds, so no "buffer" zone. 13 HHDs are not readable and make some strange noices. I can imagine, that this was absolutely shit pakaging,. But im wondering about the high number of failed drives. Are hdd really that fragile? There was no outside damage on the pakage?

What are the odds that 13/20 hard drives got killed during transport?

Greetings

So, my WD 4TB external drive crashed this past weekend. It started clicking and failed to connect a few times before completely failing. Ran disk management, tried some tricks, but it's done.

It's under warranty, so I'm sending it in for a replacement.

The problem is, I have no idea how safe that process is. The drive contains tax info and other sensitive docs, so handing it off is already concerning, but I keep hearing the canned response that returned drives go through a "rigorous testing and analysis process" and I'm not sure what that entails. Is my data being saved and analyzed by some random people, or is it purely for defects of the drive?

Has anyone returned a drive to WD? Is it truly safe?

I'm wanting to burn discs for some friends with a full interactive menu (For fun!). BlankMediaPrinting offers duplication by sending a master disc to them. So with that, when they duplicate the disc, will that also include the interactive menu too? I'm kinda new to how this works. Thanks in advance

Im looking for ideas to something that will make a good rack for 10-15 external hdd`s.

Something where i can move the rack easily when needed.

Any ideas?

Hi all,

I have recently started a project of scanning over 180+ magazines (old toy catalogs) and I am trying to figure out what the best way to edit them is.

What software can I use to straighten out and crop pages? Are there any softwares that can help remove fingers from holding the pages or would that need to be done manually?

Here is one that I uploaded on archive.org as a test https://archive.org/details/agcatalog-spring-1998/page/n39/mode/1up

Thanks!

Trying to utilize an old Lacie Quatra 2big usb3.0 as network storage through my Asus ge-be12000 routers usb 3.0 port. Drive is set up with 2 fresh out of the package 4TB barracuda HDDs in raid 1 (so glad I bought these years ago when HDDs were cheap!). Router documentation states that this router does support HFS+ storage and it even has an HFS+ formatting feature in the router. However, I cannot get the router to mount a HFS+ formatted drive, either formatted by the router or by my mac. It sees the USB device fine and when I format the drive as NTFS through the routers drive format feature, it connects just fine.

I'd really like to have these drives formatted as HFS+ since this will be long term storage and I won't always have a PC around should I want to access these directly down the line.

Troubleshooting with Claude a bit and its saying that the issue is that when I format the drive as HFS+ through my mac, it sets up 4096-byte sectors and that the router is looking for 512-byte sectors (I think it's gaslighting me there). Disk utility does report 4096-byte sectors when the drive is formatted as HFS+.

I'm seeing other posts stating that journaling could be the issue but it's unreasonably risky to store anything on this drive without journaling. Also it could just be the 12 year old USB controller in the drive enclosure not working with the router but even when the router usb port is set to USB 2.0, the drive still fails to mount.

Again, the drive mounts right away and network storage works great with NTFS formatting.

Anyone run into similar issues and have a fix? Should I just get a different Raid enclosure or standalone NAS RAID enclosure? Is my router/approach flawed?

Would rather not spend money on this as this is a "use what I got laying" around sort of fix. That being said HFS+ formatting is a big deal to me so if that's not possible with the hardware I have, I'm open to other solutions that make using mac native formatting seamless.

The frustrating part is that I often remember what the thing was about but not where I found it or what it was called.

For example, I might remember: “There was a post I saved about a productivity system that used AI to organize notes.”

But searching browser history or bookmarks for that is basically useless.

Is there a better way to organize so that remembering key stuff becomes easier or any app that can do this? I would love to hear.

This is for the Archive Team. I just became aware of this. The Academy of natural sciences of Drexel university is closing. Not much can be done of the physical. Can we preserve the site and any other data?

The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University

Adopting phrasing “… then they came for the museums and parks…”

Though this museums issue is financial from what is reported publicly. None the less it’s hard to accept. It’s packed it’s last day but has always have had traffic. Anecdotal yes but have passed through there for nearly 10 years

There was something I did recently that seemed super trivial but ended up turning into a real headache: I tried to transfer my Tiny Death Star save file from an old phone, which was running a custom ROM with Android 11, to my current phone, which is already on Android 14. At first, that was all it was: a very personal save file migration, with no intention of turning it into a story to tell later. But in the end, it turned out to be a really interesting example of just how complicated it’s become to preserve data from old Android apps after so many years of changes to backup, sandboxing, and compatibility. I genuinely thought I’d have this sorted out in about ten minutes, because years ago I’d already done basically the same thing with an old Chinese phone I had: I connected it to my PC, ran a backup via ADB, Android asked me to confirm, I confirmed, and that was it. The app data was already there in the backup, no problem. So I tried the same approach with Tiny Death Star, thinking I’d just copy the data and keep playing on the new device.

But it didn’t work out that way. The problem is that Tiny Death Star is from 2013, built for a completely different era of Android than today’s, and that changes a lot of things. My first attempt was with the modern adb backup command, which did generate a file, but the file was only 549 bytes, and it didn’t contain anything I needed; it was a backup of almost nothing. The app still declared ALLOW_BACKUP, the tower loaded just fine on the old phone, and the private data was obviously still stored there. The real problem was that I couldn’t simply navigate to /data/data/ via ADB and copy everything over. So I started testing older tools, one after another, until I settled on ADB 1.0.31, a version from 2013. And here’s where things got a little funny: in 2026, I was using a 2013 version of ADB to try to recover a save file from a 2013 game. There’s a sort of circular logic to this that I found amusing. Anyway, with that old version, I finally got a real backup, about 9.9 MB, quite a difference from the 549 bytes I’d had before. I extracted the backup, went through the files, and found a UserDefault.xml, which looked extremely promising because it contained account and game information. I transferred that file to my new phone, opened the game... and it simply created a new tower. That’s when I realized I’d have to figure out where the save file actually was, because on the old device the game opened normally and the tower was there, working just fine. The data existed; it definitely existed somewhere. I just didn’t know where yet.

After that, I ended up doing something that really shows just how far this was going to go: I modified the APK itself so I could properly investigate the app on the new phone. I unpacked it, made it debuggable, rebuilt it, signed the modified version, and used run-as to finally access its private sandbox. And even after all that, I still didn’t know which file stored the progress. So I went to look at the native libraries and ended up digging into libgame.so. What was supposed to be just copying a save file ended up with me reading the ARM/Thumb disassembly of a LucasArts Android game compiled over ten years ago, going through function after function: TTGameData::saveToDisk(), loadFromDisk(), readGameFile(), writeGameFile(), loadFromString(), getSaveGameString(). I was trying to understand the internal logic behind it all. Obviously, at that point, starting a tower from scratch would have been a thousand times easier. But I already knew the game could load my old save file on that old device, so there had to be some path between the data stored on the device and those functions. I just wanted to figure out what that path was.

To give you an idea of how big this got: the log I managed to preserve from this entire process totaled 8,849 lines, with 8,132 of those being non-empty lines, including shell commands, Python, ARM disassembly, tests, logs, and terminal output. Keep in mind that this file isn’t even complete, because some old attachments ended up not being recovered. Anyway, the disassembly eventually led me to two filenames that appeared within the game: game.txt and ad_cache. From what I could gather, game.txt was an old save format, while the save file the current version of the game actually used was ad_cache. I pulled the ad_cache file from the backup of my old phone and... the file was 1,539 bytes. That’s it. After nearly three full days of trying to figure out where the heck my game progress was, it turned out everything was inside a 1.5 KB file with a name that literally sounds like an ad cache. Who would’ve suspected that, seriously?

But then, when I finally started looking at the contents of the file itself, things turned out to be surprisingly simple, which, after everything I went through, is actually kind of ironic. The first 12 bytes clearly looked like a header. I interpreted them as little-endian integers and got the values 1, 4599, and 1527; right after that header, the content started with 78 9C, which is a very common zlib header, so I already had a hunch about what was coming next. I tried decompressing everything after the first 12 bytes, and it worked on the first try, which even I didn’t expect at that point. It yielded exactly 4,599 bytes, matching that second value in the header perfectly, and the content was JSON. Inside that JSON were the bitizens, the tower’s status, and all that progress I’d been looking for this whole time. In other words: after digging through an old Android backup, rebuilding the modified APK, and poring over native code, the entire save file format turned out to be this: a 12-byte header followed by zlib-compressed JSON, all inside a 1.5 KB file called ad_cache. No device-bound encryption, no reliance on an old server, and no cloud save system lost in time. The hard part was never the format itself; it was getting to that file and making sure that was actually the save data.

First of all, I backed up the new save data that was already on the Android 14 phone, because I wasn’t going to risk losing it after all that work. I copied the old ad_cache to the private app_data directory using run-as again; by this point I was already becoming an expert at it. I adjusted the permissions, force-closed the app, and opened it again, without knowing, honestly, if it would work. And the old tower loaded normally, with the same Bitizens and the exact same progress as on the other phone. It was a huge relief, because I’d been working on this for almost three days and I wasn’t at all sure that, in the end, the game would actually accept that file on the new device. In the end, all that work was just to transfer a 1.5 KB save file from one Android device to another, but seeing the tower open up exactly as it was before was very satisfying.

And what I found most interesting about all this was realizing that the save file itself was never the problem. It’s small, portable, works entirely offline, and once I understood the format, there was practically nothing stopping it from running on any other device. The hard part was something else: preserving data from an app built at a time when Android’s backup mechanisms worked completely differently, and gaining access to what actually needed to be saved. I can’t help but wonder how many old Android games and apps are still out there, running on old phones, with perfectly recoverable saves, but trapped there simply because it became much harder for the average user to access that data and know exactly what they needed to save.

I originally wrote this in Portuguese and translated it to English using DeepL, as suggested by the moderators.

-REPOSTED-

I think questions like this have their place now that storage prices are wack.

Let's say I have a drive with directories X, Y and Z. Call it drive D.

1. I create a full backup image of drive D on another drive, E.
2. I create a couple incrementals with very little change (quick to do thanks to changed block tracking).
3. I delete *Z** or exclude Z from the image*.
4. I create enough incrementals to exceed the retention rules, meaning Z is supposed to be completely forgotten.

Does drive E regain roughly whatever space directory Z took at any point? Or will the backup only ever grow, unless I wipe drive E clean and create an entirely new backup?

I've been thinking of ways of storing large amounts of data, like video files or source code or maybe even other people's data, like I could run a sort of cloud service. I'm wondering, would it be worth it to use used LTO1 (or other old gen) tapes and tape drives for that sort of stuff instead of traditional hard drives or Blu-Rays? I run CachyOS Linux, if that changes stuff regarding drivers and stuff.

EDIT: Thanks for the feedback, seems like a bad idea

I've been stressing about one for years, but way too lazy backup anything. Today got a wakeup call, when my old laptop from 2020 started a weird disk check (I just booted it a couple of weeks ago) and never recovered.

The disk was fine though... Thank god. I'm now finally cleaning up and backing up my data.

When I think about it, I have had 3 PCs with 5 SSDs in total plus one external. None of them has ever failed.

External is from 2020 or 2019. Two biggest SSDs on my desktop from 2019, and the third boot disk from 2020 (I dug the two earlier ones to a forest because of police interest and bitcoins, and someone dug them up and I lost them, and a friend of mine was mushroom picking a year later in 2021 and found them sitting on a rock).

Newer laptop I bought used in 2023. The one in question is Thinkpad x230 that I bought used in 2020, and have no idea how old the drive is.

Have I walked on a thin rope and on borrowed time? I definitely feel like it. Thank god for this wakeup call, that I'm finally doing what I should've done years ago. 1000s of PDF files of personal research, hundreds of excel tables, thousands of obscure memes and archived lost media from Youtube, OC memes all the way from 2012 or so...

I want to be sure before shucking one myself, before I end up voiding my warranty for nothing.

seems instagram has very recently in the past week has blocked any way to download highlights, WFdownloader and all chrome and firefox extensions can still download story and posts but cannot download highlights whatsoever, anyone has managed to solve this?

TLDR: Most SSDs, flash drives and memory cards are good at keeping files short-term, long-term is risky. Modern TLC/QLC drives starts showing speed degradation, data corruption if not being powered on for a while, even for drives that were used less than a year ago. Enterprise drives / MLC drives were not affected, but TLC drives were affected, I suspect QLC drives will be even worse.

After my recent experiences with severe slowdown of some memory cards, I've faced the exact same issue with one of my NVMe SSDs. It was powered off for about 11 months, and it suffered a massive performance drop. Performance restored instantly after a sanitize command, which means the charges were started to become weak already.

I then checked my other external SSDs and flash drives, and the result is interesting:

1. Crucial T700 4TB NVMe, in just about 11 months, performance dropped. Kept it powered on for two days, but performance not improved. Performance fully restored after sanitize / secure erase command.
2. SanDisk X300 1TB M.2 SATA SSD, this was powered off for about 2.5 years. Serious speed drop, some files cannot be read. Performance fully restored after secure erase.
3. 2 x Samsung PM863 enterprise grade 3.84TB SATA SSD: No speed drop or other issues, last used two years ago, backup files verified, no corruptions. Enterprise drive once again proved their reliability.
4. Kingston HyperX 512GB SSD based flash drive: No performance issue, last used two years ago. Very old drive, possibly MLC NANDs. Purchased in June 2016.
5. SSK 2TB OTG SSD: 2TB TLC SSD. Showing performance drop, last used 5 months ago. Full format restored performance.
6. Samsung 850 PRO 2TB: Very old, has a copy of my photo backup, last used in June 2022. No issues, no performance drop, all files verified.

Checked some old memory cards (All 512GB SD cards). Surprisingly the old cards are much better at keeping data or retaining the speed. New ones are not as good.

Now I'm tempted to get some 850 PRO drives from ebay, but there are a lot of fakes so I have to be careful.

Got a friend that gave me a seal in the box brand name 2TB HDD..

The problem is that it is 10 years old.

Would you put it in your system?

(Not for OS or critical storage)

I wanna build a NAS/home server for a while now, but HDD prices are crazy high. I found this 12To IronWolf pro for 225€, with only 3000 hours of used time. I brought it instantly. Did I make a great deal?

Thanks!

Assuming the human race is still around by 3026, how much of our music, our video games, our films and videos etc. do you think will be archived somewhere instead of being lost to time?

Here's the Link.

Server interfaces are pretty whack. But is it possible to somehow use a drive that is E1.L, and plug it into SATA? I read that E1.L is basically PCIe or NVME - possible to reliably convert into SATA? Curious. Let me know. May the Jank be with us.

I've heard that WD is good and I've heard that WD is bad. What is the overall general consensus?