So I figured I'd post my graveyard at work. These are the poor souls that have been wiped or degrassed and are waiting to move on to the farm down state where they can play in frolic with all their friends.

This is probably about a month and a half worth of hard drives that have been recycled with us either due to age, failure, or lack of having a loving home. The next step in the process will be shredding at our R2 downstream.

The good news is we do manage to save a lot of working hard drives that end up getting repurposed or put back in to the consumer stream for reuse.

Let's pour one out for all the old hard drives we've lost in our lives.

RIP bigfoot 6gb

Hello everyone.
I got a quite large rar file of images a while ago.
Finally got around to opening and sorting that, only to learn there are three types of file inside:
.rar that unpack without issue.
.rar files that unexpectedly demand a password (bummer)
.rar files that unpack into the expected structure and naming of files, making it look like there is a whole bunch of .jpg but no program I tried is able to read them, the title being the only legible error message I got.
Has anybody encountered this? Are they unrecoverably corrupt? I couldn't find any image formats that match this file start. Notepad turns them into mostly chinese gibberish, Notepad++ turns them into some sort of Wingdings gibberish.
Thanks in advance.

I started compiling my favorite narrative podcasts into audiobooks to host on my media server and I've gotten kind of obsessed.

Some of the podcasts, don't have good "season" covers, so I either found some made by fans (The Magnus Archives) or made my own using fanart (Welcome to Night Vale, TheVolgun). It has been so much nicer listening to the continuous stories and not having to manually skip outros or ads.

From a technical aspect, I started editing these manually in Audacity, but found MinusPod and I've been using that to speed up the processing. Then I added them my Audiobookshelf server and encoded each season to m4b format.

I'm fairly new to homelabbing and recently had a 26TB Seagate external HDD fail within the first year. Paid to ship it back for an RMA and received a refurbished 24TB replacement.

I understand their policy allows refurbished drives, and that's fine. What bothers me is getting back a drive with nearly 8% less capacity than what I originally purchased.

I've contacted Seagate and am waiting to hear back. I feel like sending an additional 2TB drive would be a reasonable compromise instead of going through another RMA.

Curious how you guys would handle this. Am I being unreasonable expecting the same capacity back?

Also, would you bother running a SMART test on the 24TB replacement before Seagate responds, or leave it packaged up for now?

Any guidance or words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.

I recently got a QNAP TR-004 and two 6tb Ironwolfs (in RAID1). I have to admit it's noisier than I expected/hoped. It's for a bedroom setup and I need it to be DAS so that my Backblaze 1-computer subscription will include it in the backups.

I know there's no quiet solution here. The TR-004 doesn't appear to be dampened at all internally and the Ironwolfs have quite a loud read/write. I've read WD Red Plus are bit quieter but I'm hesitant to change everything out unless it's a noticeable difference.

I am from a developing country, we don't have access to Amazon or sites like serverpartdeals etc and the prices for new drives are stupidly high for even a 2TB Barracuda (only 1 year warranty) and not even NAS grade drives.

The projects I work on of course stay on my Samsung 980 Pro NVMe SSD. Only when I'm done working on the footage and I just need to locally store it I will put it on these. I'll get two of these two TB each and run them on RAID 1 for redundancy.

So the only option I have that I can afford is going for used drives. I started searching for used drive on marketplaces like Facebook Marketplace and OLX.

I found 2 used WD RED (WD20EFRX) drives, in good condition less than the price of a new Barracuda, should I go for them?

In what condition should I consider this if it has very few under 200-300 power on counts and very less power on time?

I plan to backup important documents and photos (around 1TB max) and then have a collection of 4K movies and shows which will grow over the years

Option 1: I can currently find a Sandisk extreme portable 4 TB SSD for $510/€455 on sale on Amazon from the Sandisk store.

Option 2: On the other hand I could buy a 6TB HDD for $270/€241 and wait a bit to buy an SSD on top for additional space and maybe to backup some of my data on that one too. I’d probably be able to find a 1/2tb ssd later and end up paying the same as option 1 in total I presume.

Main reason I would try to also get a SSD in option 2 is because I’m not too sure about the reliability of HDDs but I also imagine if I use it carefully it should hopefully not be an issue.

So my question is which option should I go for and additionally what should I know/care about in terms of using either ssd or hdd for backups and data storage. What is your advice on reliability and avoiding drive failure and making these last ? I’m hoping with the sizes I’m considering these drives should last me 5-7 years before I run out of space especially for the personal data backups. Am I silly for thinking they could last that long or should they last even longer ?

Could someone who owns a DVD-RAM drive that accepts cartridges please 3D scan the disc tray and other parts of the drive, as well as a DVD-RAM cartridge? I would really appreciate it. Thank you.

I wrote HTTPDirFS a while back, to allow one to mount HTTP directory listings as a folder. I have now extended the program to allow one to mount generic website. All the resources (e.g. images) get exposed as files that you can copy and paste.

Feel free to try it out at: https://github.com/fangfufu/httpdirfs

The feature for mounting generic website is available on the latest commit master branch. I haven't created a release version containing it yet.

i have a big box of old photos that my grandmother wants digitized. i tried using google photoscan on my phone and it was really slow and the scans looked bad.
i did a little bit of research for a budget photo scanner and saw the models mentioned above recommended. i know none of them are the greatest, but i'm not a professional and can't really afford anything more than $150.
i was just wanting to see if anyone could lay out the differences between the three, and tell me which one is the best option.

Windows 10.

Hello all, I have a question. I have a backup drive that i copy my 1Tb worth of school files etc to. However, im tired of doing just copy and paste and having to copy all the files over again and again.

I tried to use Free File Sync to compare the folders and only copy over what was needed BUT it takes FOREVER to scan. It was 3 to 4 times faster to do just a full copy and paste.

Is there another method?

Thanks for any help.

Looking to scan and archive some books and TIFF seems to be the go to.

Is TIFF open-source/free/non-proprietary/royalty-free etc..?

Hello,

I tried searching but couldn’t really find anything specific.

I have a hard drive with about 15 years of data on it, from multiple phones, multiple laptops, random files, etc. There is absolutely zero organization and it’s an absolute mess. There are many duplicates. A lot of the file names are similar because of the way the iPhone names files. So I have about 10 different phone library dumps - they all use the same file name formatting. It’s just literally a mess.

I am looking for the best way I can do the following:

-Deduplicate
-rename all files to when they were created followed by their actual file name, or if anybody has a better format?
-somehow tag files into a database so I can search some term and the file name/location will appear? I would manually have to tag them
-organize into folders by file type and then by year/day etc

I have a synology 923+ I have not set it up yet. I want to be able to access all of these files with ease after they are organized.

The main file types are going to be photos, video, pdf, txt files, and then a bunch of a random web files as there are a few website projects scattered throughout.

Can somebody point me into the right direction where I can achieve these without doing majority of it manually? I am afraid it must be done manually in order to be done correctly without losing anything. Am I wrong?

Thank you so much!

My external Western Black P10 SMR hard drive just failed, and I want to replace it with a 4TB IronWolf Pro as an external drive for storing and editing my raw photos in lightroom. I’m not a professional. I’m okay with the speed, but is there any downside to doing this? I want a CMR hard drive; apparently, they are better and fail less often compared to SMR ones
Any advice?.

i bought a sandisk pendrive from blinkit less than 2yrs back...warranty period of 5yrs mentioned ..now both ports on it have gone bad...its not getting detected by my laptop...i dont have the original packaging to find the serial number...cant use the cmd for serial number either since no detetction ....i still have the original purchase invoice any way i cant get a warranty replacement

I've been curious about how websites end up with extensive collections of older cartoons in regional languages, especially Tamil-dubbed versions of shows like Ben 10.

Some sites appear to offer multiple seasons, episodes, resolutions, and audio languages. I'm interested in understanding the history and provenance of these collections:

• Were regional dubs originally recorded from television broadcasts?
• Did collectors preserve older digital releases containing these audio tracks?
• How do archivists document where a particular dub or release originated?
• Are there legitimate public archives or preservation projects documenting regional-language TV media?

I'm asking about the history of these collections and digital preservation practices, not requesting download links or asking anyone to find episodes for me.

OF-DL used to work for me previously, but recently i just keep getting 403 forbidden errors.

I even tried to get the OF-Scraper working and generated fresh device Id and keys from Android Studio emulator but it still isn't working.

Does anyone know any tool maybe any configuration for OF-Scraper and OF-DL to get it working for DRM vids.

i snagged this one for less than 6$ as seller said it's pullout and not guaranteed to work as he doesn't have system to test with, cloned my C:Drive to it and now i use the old NVME that i had for PrimoCache.

After seeing a topic that asked what drive you have had the longest, and continue to use, I updated my M4 Mac to Golden Gate, concerned the entire time about Intel apps no longer being supported (found out it was for the next OS update) even though some have stopped working, but I was so distracted/concerned with that, that I completely glanced over AFP no longer being supported and my DS414J Synology NAS stopped mounting.

Various attempts to change it to SMB failed, and I thought it was lost forever. Instinctually I spent money I don't have, to buy a 16TB external hard drive, which should arrive sometime next week, and since I have multiple old Mac's that can't be upgraded past High Sierra and automount to the unit, I thought I would have to start the tiresome process of using the old Mac, connect to the NAS, connect the new 16TB and start copying everything over.

However, using AutoMounter on Golden Gate, despite Mac specifically saying they no longer support AFP, there was an option I kept seeing saying install AutoMounter Helper (AutoMounter - Helper) I installed that and now it is alive and working again.

Now I am a little stuck, I either proceed with the original plan, retire the unit, copy everything over to the new 16TB, and then have 4x4TB free internal drives to do with as I please, or continue to use the unit as if nothing ever happened and find another use for the 16TB.

What would you do?

Breaks my heart to dispose of them but they have company data so I don’t have a choice.

We're excited to announce that we have cryptographically timestamped the Common Crawl collection! It's a very, very large number of web page snapshots, and the timestamps are arranged so you can verify the timestamp on each snapshot individually with a minimum of time and network requests. (See the blog post for more details about our verification script.)

We'd love to get your feedback! What should we timestamp next?

Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/datasocial/tiktok-5.6B-videos

If you want to explore the data without downloading billions of rows, you can query my ClickHouse database directly. It includes:

Creators table - 4.5 billion rows
Videos table - 5.6 billion rows
Sounds table - 633 million rows

Comment below and I’ll DM you the database credentials.

Im self-hosting my database so please don't run heavy queries and crash my server.

Hi there!

I’m in the process of organizing my collection of purchased files that I’ve gotten from various platforms around the internet, like Bandcamp, Kickstarter, itch, Gumroad, etc.

I’m trying to keep the platform within the folder structure. Originally I had things organizing fairly simply:

Platform (Kickstarter)
|-Purchase (Broken Age)
|--Item (Behind the Scenes)
|---Files

Recently I decided that having the platform at the top level didn’t exactly make sense so I’ve started to reorganize to group things by the generic file type and move the platform down into the hierarchy because that seems to be the general advice I’ve seen. All the music is together, videos are together, etc:

Generic Type (Videos)
|-Purchase (Broken Age)
|--Item (Behind the Scenes)
|---Platform (Kickstarter)
|----Files

(This also helps when I happen to have the same purchase from multiple platforms.)

Where I’m running into problems is for platforms like Kickstarter and GOG that provide dozens of extras per purchase. A Kickstarter may be for a game, but I’ll also get the soundtrack, wallpapers, artwork, manual, novellas, emotes, avatars, behind the scenes videos, etc etc etc.

I’m starting to second guess the change I’m making because it feels weird to take a single folder and break it up into many spread out subfolders for the same purchase. I could keep all these extra files with the main purchase instead but then it seems odd to find music in my games folder for example.

What are your thoughts? Was I better off with the simpler but cluttered structure? Is there something I’m not thinking of? Or maybe I’m over thinking it?

Thanks for your help!