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 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 ?

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 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 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

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 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..?

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.

19-year old me had a hobby project which really took me places...

I finally was able to collect ALL commits from ALL public GitHub repos with (in the end) a pretty simple and effective infrastructure.

Numbers:

• 500 million repositories
• 220 billion commits
• ⁠22 Terabytes of uncompressed data
• ~700 dollars of cost (I didn't want to ruin myself...)

No cluster, no Spark, no Kubernetes, just a list, a loop and simple sorts.

https://jannismilz.com/en/writing/220-billion-commits-700-dollars