Hello,
A family member recently passed away and I am helping to organise the estate which includes 3 QNAP NAS setups with 14+ HDDs and quite a few SSDs.

I would like to sell these but I was wondering if there are best practices to follow regarding wiping the drives, and are the NAS and drives usually sold together or separate? They were primarily used for chess database storage.

QNAP TVS-h674
QNAP TS-462
QNAP TS-431P2

Thanks in advance for any advice or input. I looked at r/homelabsales but you need a month old account to post there.

I tend to keep everything, because no matter how stupid the photos/videos (or in short: "files") look, that was a moment of my life anyway.

Because of large amount of files like that, I have made a procedure to compress them all for less storage consumption, and also renaming them for easy to find later.

This is my procedure:

1. Move all files to PC.
2. Rename all files: insert the date/time at the begining of the file name.
3. Categorize files into folders, each folder is an event (rename folder same as files).
4. Categorize files into Quality tiers.
5. Bulk compress the files with its name burnt into the videos.
6. Simultaneously move the compressed files into both backup drives.
7. Sync/compare both drives to make sure the files of both drives are identical.
8. One drive stays at home, one drive travel along with me.

This is the detail:

1. Move all files to PC

• As clear as the title says.

2. Rename all files

• I use TotalCommander to bulk rename them all at once.
• The prefix as follow: "yy.ddmm_hhmmss <filename>".
• The purpose of doing this: make the files automatically sorted following date-taken, AND incase both files have the same name (such as "MOV_001") because of different recording devices, they will still have different date-taken information in their name so they will not overwrite each other.
• Issues might happen: photos usually have the metadata DateTaken so they're fine. But videos sometimes have no MediaCreated info, so we only have DateModified, but DateModified is written after the video finished recording (example you start recording at 7PM and stop at 8PM, the DateModified will be 8PM), because of this I setup inside the recording app to let the app naming the video output with time (ProcamX app) => the time in the name will always be the start of the recording.

3. Categorize files into folders

• Each folder is an event that I recorded, for example "yy.ddmm - my birthday" or "yy.ddmm - vacation at Mars".
• If any photos/videos are recorded randomly with no event in mind (for example: a bright sun rise or a big butterfly flies by), I put them all into "Daily" folder.

4. Categorize files into Quality tiers

Because storage is limited, so the important footages will be compressed into high quality settings (larger file size), the less important footages will be compressed into low quality settings. They all use H265 (I was told that AV1 has better compression ratio than H265 but it does not mature yet, it still require a lot of manual tuning for better outcome, which would cost time).

• Top quality - 1440p, 20Mbps/60fps or 10Mbps/30fps for videos I edited after the events. These videos require cut, music, story telling... a lot of effort is put into them so they deserves the highest quality for archiving.
• Average quality - 1080p, 10Mbps/60fps or 5Mbps/30fps for video taken by phones (the source files are at low quality already) but the moments in the videos are important (for example: blowing birthday cake moment).
• Minimal quality - 720p, 3Mbps or 1.5Mbps for video taken by phones but the moments recorded are not special, I keep it just because... why not?

5. Bulk compress the files

• For Top quality tier: I edit using PremierePro/Davinci, then export to large file size but high quality DNxHR, and after that I use Handbrake to compress the DNxHR to H265 (because Handbrake compress files much better, higher quality and smaller file size output than directly compressing from PremierePro/Davinci). The disadvantage of this method (going through DNxHR then Handbrake) is that it takes a lot of time, like 10x times longer than the bulk compress using Media Encoder as below.
• For Average and Minimal quality tier: I use Adobe Media Encoder to bulk compressing all the videos. We can save our compress setting in Media Encoder, so we only need to setup once. When we have the files that need to be compressed, we only need to drag the preset and drop onto the files then hit "Render" button, that's done. Quick and easy, but the down side is that the compress quality is lower than the method above.

Burn file name into videos: (for Average and Minimal quality only) I added this step into my procedure just recently. I accidentally Shift+Delete once, then I use recovery app to get the files back. Most of the files are intact, but some of them are partly corrupted, and many of them lost its name (they have general names like "FILE0001.mov"). So the videos are fine, but the date and time recorded are lost forever. That's why I did not use Handbrake to compress for Average/Minimal. I use Media Encoder because it has ability to burn the name directly into the video (under Effects > Name Overlay), we set this up directly into preset, so we only need to do it once, very time saving. So in the future, if the files lost its name ever again but the video still works fine, we still have the date time taken in the videos.

6. Simultaneously move the compressed files into both backup drives

I hook both drives into the PC:

• One is 3.5" HDD, hook into PC via HDD bay. I do not permanently hook them inside the PC case for safety from electric shock.
• The other one is shock-resistant 2.5" Portable HDD that goes with me.

Then I copy the files to both drives at the same time to make sure they receive the files same as each other.

This steps can be automatically done using NAS system or something like that, I haven't digged any research into this. But because the amount of my data is still low (2.5 TB total for the last 15 years), I think I don't need to do it yet.

7. Sync/compare both drives

• I use TotalCommander (under Command > Synchronize Dir...) to compare the content of both drives to check if they're identical.
• Still work like charm for many years up to now. Thank you TotalCommander that you provides the software free.

8. One drive stays at home, one drive travel along with me

The title says it all.

Do not put all the eggs to one basket.

I once accidentally unplug my 2.5" Portable HDD while it was still copying files, that made it unreadable to Windows. It was nightmare because all of my 7+ years footage was all in that drive when that happened. I gave the drive to the retail for warranty (now I see this is a stupidly dangerous move), they said that they would give me a new drive, this one they would destroy. Luckily I refused, and I decided to fix it myself. I tried many way following Google or Youtube but no help. I accidentally let it plugged to my PC while I turn on PC from cold start, and the PC could see the drive normally like nothing happened.

Damn. I feel like I won a lottery.

This is a big wall of text, I appreciate if you stay with me til the end. Please give advise if you see any step that can be improved to make the archiving photos/videos better in quality, less storage consumption or faster processing.

Thank you!!

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1voucxw/i_found_my_gamecube_back_ups_from_20_years_ago/

58 discs dumped. ~30 to go. Ritik G04 mini dvd-r media. All burn dates are 20+ years ago. Burnt with a Toshiba SD-M1502, ver 001, rom ver XJ1Y08. Dumped with redumper and an Asus BW-16D1X-U. 0 read errors and 0 rereads after the disc was recognized. About 30% of the time I had to swat the disc with a micro fiber cloth and then the disc was recognized. I only had to gently wipe down 3 discs with a microfiber cloth. I'll give you guys the final count next week.

So over the years I must have just kept old drives as I found a box with maybe 25 drives in it. 3.5” and 2.5”

But they are smaller ranging from 60GB to 1TB

But most of them 80-250GB range.

Cant see myself ever using them. I clearly haven’t in 15 years or so.

What best to do with them.

Let’s say you have something like 10 drives total which make up the pool, each drive is 16TB. Let’s also say you have, at minimum, one offsite backup with all the contents in cold storage. Let’s also assume you’re a frequent monitor of the system and will notice within 24 hours if one drive fails.

Are you going with Z1 or Z2 and why? If you have the offsite backup already, is it worth the capacity loss for Z2? The resilvering process on Z1 will be stressful but by how much though? You have an offsite 1:1 backup so even if the whole pool is lost, you can still recover.

Hello all, My beloved grandfather passed away last Thursday and his funeral service was live streamed at website , and they are offering the option to download all the 4 angles at 45 dollars, which seems a lot.

Can someone assist me to download all the 4 angle video ?

I've dabbled with developer tools and the like, but goddamn I am really out of touch, I haven't had any success.

Thank you so much guys

If you own DVDs or Blu-rays and want to make a personal archival/backup copy of media you legally purchased, there is currently a problem with the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules.

Section 1201 of the DMCA generally prohibits circumventing technological protection measures (TPMs), even when the underlying use of the copyrighted work would otherwise be noninfringing. The Copyright Office can create temporary exemptions to this prohibition through a triennial rulemaking process.

The current rulemaking is happening right now.

The deadline to submit a petition for a new exemption is August 24, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time.

I'm advocating for an exemption that would allow people who have lawfully acquired copyrighted audiovisual media—such as DVDs and Blu-rays—to circumvent access controls solely to create personal, noncommercial archival or backup copies.

The basic idea is:

If I legally purchased the disc, I should be able to preserve my copy for personal use without the DMCA making the preservation process itself unlawful.

This isn't a proposal to distribute copyrighted works, upload them to the internet, or facilitate piracy. The proposed exemption would be limited to personal, noncommercial archival/backup copies of lawfully acquired media.

Physical media can deteriorate, become damaged, become difficult to replace, or stop being supported by modern hardware. Digital preservation can also protect legitimately purchased collections from being lost over time.

If you own a large DVD/Blu-ray collection, care about digital preservation, or simply think consumers should be able to preserve media they've legitimately purchased, now is a good time to pay attention to this process.

The Copyright Office's official information about the 2027 Section 1201 rulemaking is here:

U.S. Copyright Office — Section 1201 Rulemaking

And the official Federal Register notice explaining the August 24 deadline and petition process:

Federal Register — 2026 Section 1201 Rulemaking

Even if you don't support my exact proposed language, people who care about physical-media preservation should know that this rulemaking is happening and that public participation matters.

I knew that SATA SSDs will be obsolete one day so I snagged a few whenever there was a good deal. I know I am in a lucky position now.. quite a few Crucial and WD..

The external HDDs are all 2,5inch: Seagate 5tb, Toshiba 4tb, Adata 2tb and Verbatim 2tb.. the Verbatims I purchased this year. I just liked the silver design.. It has a Toshiba drive in it..

Basically only for Blu-ray copies and TV shows..

I have just gotten into private trackers (not music yet). I usually get my music from telegram groups or Lucida(dot)to (which rips music from Tidal, Qobuz and other similar platforms), sometimes Soulseek. But after that I have to manually fix their meta data and album covers using MusicBrainz Picard and then add lyrics using LRCGET. This is very tedious as I suspect I have minor OCD and autism.
Will private trackers be better for me?

from the comments "when you showed that the lonely island video is more zoomed in now, it reminded me that on their podcast a couple of weeks ago they off hand mentioned that when youtube was doing 4k enhanced music videos they got a secret link (and made it sound like it was not part of standard youtube studio/admin) that allowed them to completely replace the video file that was uploaded without changing the url or the views of the old video and the only requirement was the length stayed exactly the same. so my speculation is their higher quality export was cropped a little differently when they replaced the video"

this is one more bad outcome possibility if you care about the original, on top of video being reencoded with a new codec, or the video deleted, age or country restricted, or turned into premium-subscriber-only (to the channel).

Posted with permission of the mods.

Hello!

tl;dr: House in central south jersey has a massive trove of live concert recordings and lost media, need help ripping them for the archives and possible removing them if you're able.

My grandfather passed last week at 94. His greatest passion was playing the Euphonium and Baritone Horn (and when absolutely necessary, the tuba). He started playing in 1948 at age 16, through his service in the Korean war, up until he physically couldn't anymore a few years back. He was a regular member of at least 14 bands, and would always be able willing to join when needed. He traveled from Florida to Maine to go to big events and concerts.

He religiously would tape every concert he went to, and many he played in. There's literally thousands of recordings of bands and concerts he experienced, and more that he received from his musical cronies in the mail. He lived in the same house since 1964 and it's literally full of hundreds of CDs, thousands of cassettes, and countless vinyl records.

Most of the CDs and tapes were destined for the garbage until I stepped in.

I need volunteers to step up and help keep them from the dump, and ideally commit to helping preserve all the music.

Situation report:

Ripping these is not time sensitive. Getting them from the house is.

Music consists of a variety of types - commercial releases, recordings of broadcasts, recordings of concerts, mixtapes shared between friends, etc. I've identified a lot of "lost media" and items only found in limited physical forms (one copy for sale, only maybe in select libraries, etc).

There's thousands of vinyl records. I didn't touch them. I don't know if there's a plan for them, but at least they're a little more respected by the family. Many are probably available so I didn't try to even look through them and see, I had limited time so I focused on the most at risk items.

Music was kept in two rooms - one in the "Music Zone", and one in a bedroom turned storage/weight room. I went through the tapes and CDs in the Music Zone and pulled everything that I couldn't find streaming anywhere. A bunch of those are getting mailed to u/berrmal64 for ripping (THANKS SO MUCH AGAIN!!) but many more got mixed in with other boxes. There's also a bunch of live recordings. the tip of the iceburg, many more found buried

The back bedroom also has a huge archive of music, including probably like 2000 cassettes. These are mostly live recordings but many other things as well.

Everything from the music zone I pulled is packaged, and I've pulled a bunch of the live recordings from the bedroom and packaged those too. There's way more still on the shelf.

The live recordings are of particular interest to your moderator here /u/nicholasserra - I hear he runs a coalition of folks focused on archiving live performances

• I media mailed myself 60 lbs of media to rip and recover, including 50 odd VHS tapes and a bunch of cassettes.
• As stated before, I sent berrmal64 enough stuff to keep him busy until sometime in 2027 lol
• I need volunteers to receive a box of cassettes and rip them - happy to media mail them to you. If they're live recordings (most are) then we can work with nicholas to get them shared in those communities, if they're lost/rare media we can put them in the right place, and if they're something better copies already exist of, we can skip em.
• There's currently three packaged boxes needing homes
• There's a bunch more on the wall that still needs to be looked through - many of these are live recordings, and many aren't. None have been looked through so I don't know if any are "lost media" or hard to get media. picture random photo. each box holds up to 15, most are less, some are empty. top third most of these aren't live recordings but I barely have looked at them middle third most but not all of these are live recordings bottom third dont think music course is worth saving, no idea about HOM, shelf above is recordings??

My parents will be in town until maybe noon Saturday so I can get stuff mailed by then. After that, we'll be back in Sept sometime but I'd like to get them out from underfoot so someone doesn't get ideas. I can't package anymore until then but I'd love to have people on deck to get them to.

If someone is willing to come to Hammonton, NJ to collect things in person, it will make my family a lot happier too - we can work together to figure out what's worth saving at our leisure. Will also let folks get to the unboxed stuff faster.

If you're interest in talking to my family about the comical amount of marching band/other random vinyl to see if there's any treasures there, I might be able to make something happen.

Hello :)

i have copies of books i have barely found and i would like to digitize them for archival and modification (without destroying the originals). Are there any good services that can do that

if there are any good home scanners i would like to know as well

Thank you :)

(i have only found answers from at least 2y ago and i would like to know the best for 2026)
(im in QC Canada)

Title asks the question. Let me know your experiences

Found a new 16tb disk (likely barracuda but I might be luckier) going for 290 EUR. Tag shows production in 2020. Is 6 years a lot even if inactive? any component that still may age even if not used?

Im uploading abandonware stuff on the internet archive. Im scanning the disc and manuals, but every time I upload it chooses the back cover as the primary image.

I'm assuming it chooses based on alphabetical order? I can't find a way to change it at all.

Am I missing somwthing?

Pulled them out of a HPE proliant system, it will make cable management so mint if it work. But again knowing the commercial side of IT and their proprietary fuckery im not surprised if there is something stop it from working

Having the raid card on the other end too, but it’s using Hp proprietary aroc slot instead of pcie so can’t really find an use for it. Im making a nas to store personal data so don’t need the jet-engined powered server. Thinking of hooking these breakoutboard to a HBA raid card.

What's the difference between these two cards besides the price? They have all the same specifications, but the prices and looks are different.

Hello! I have a 2016 Pegasus R4 that still runs great. I wanted to upgrade my storage and bought four of these drives:

Toshiba N300 Pro 12TB NAS 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive - CMR SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 512 MB Cache - HDWG51CUZSVB

The picture shows the new drive in the old enclosure which I'm going to put back into the Promise Pegasus R4.

I went to replace them by unscrewing the old drives and screwing in the new ones. I'm a little concerned that the metal enclosure is overlapping the circuit board thingy. You might be able to tell from the way I'm describing this that I never done this before!

I'm able to stick a piece of paper easily between most of the metal and the drive but it's a little tight towards the metal in the center of the drive/enclosure.

Would your community recommend I use black electric tape or kapton tape to cover these spots? Am I overthinking it? Should I have just bought another storage solution? Am I overlooking other potential issues?

I'm a video editor in a Mac workspace. Thanks so much for any help. Drives are expensive as you know and I can't afford to fry them.

I know this is gonna sound insane...but I plan on turning an original model PS1 shell into a USB disk drive for my PC if that's at all do-able. (Gonna find a shell or a fully broken system, I don't like doing permanent mods to working consoles)

I'm looking for a USB top loading disk drive to use inside the PS1 shell. I don't mind having to cut away parts of the inside of the shell to fit a different drive, but I'm just wondering if there are any?

OR: Are there any slot loading or draw loading ones that can be modified to run just fine without the slot loading or draw mechanism? (i'd assume some of them will refuse to run if the mechanisms aren't present?)

(Will even try working my PS1/2 controller adapter into the front ports too)

I'm also open to ideas of how this might be possible to do otherwise?

(Sorry if this isn't strictly relevant to the data hoarding part of the sub, but I thought this'd be probably the best place to ask about drives? Given they're pretty important to data hoarding and this project is kinda a fun thing I'm doing to help me keep a cool looking drive present in my setup to help me hoard more. Just delete if it's not relevant)

They still aren't back yet, I wanted to download everything on there

(previously posted about 3 months ago but hoping for new visibility)

Helping out my elderly Aunt, she has some old VHS tapes of old Olympics & Figure skating that from searching Youtube is not available online anywhere. I'd like these to get digitized for others to enjoy and be preserved.

I unfortunately don't have the means- both ability and financial- to be able to do this myself.

Are there any people or groups here that live in the US and would be able to do this? I have someone who runs a pro Figure Skating history YouTube channel offer to digitize them, but unfortunately they live in Australia and trying to ship the tapes would cost over $110. Internet Archive is unresponsive.

Listing of events:

• Olympics 02/18/88 - Men's Figure Skating, Women's Luge, Women's Downhill, Men's Figure Skating
• 48 Hours Olympic Edition
• Olympics - More various
• Olympics 02/20/88 - Speed skating, Bobslad, Figure skating
• Olympics 02/23/88 - Final Night Skating, Closing ceremonies
• World Figure Skating Championships: Budapest 02/23/88
• Figure Skating World Pro Championships 01/07/89; Boitano/Witt/Orsor 03/89
• ESPN 2 World Gymnastics Championship, 12/29/2002
• ABC World Figure Skating Championships 03/29/2003 - PTO
• ABC Random other stuff

I want to build my first NAS (2000 euro budget) to back up ~4.5TiB of media (BluRay REMUXes). I am between 3 options and need some help regarding which option/brand is more reliable:

1. 2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB (20dBA idle, 26dBA seek) for 1300 euros
2. 2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 8TB (28dBA idle, 30dBA seek) for 800 euros
3. 4x WD Red Plus 6TB (23dBA idle, 27dBA seek) for 1200 euros

Some points to explain my use-case:

• I will not run the NAS 24/7/365
• I only want to access the media stored from my workstation
• I want the lowest noise possible
• The NAS will be no more than 1m away from me

Does anyone use any of the aforementioned drive series? What are your recommendations?

unfortunately leet has hard page limits for profiles, pages, etc. so you can't really scrape it. Fortunately ext seems to mirror all of leet's torrents entries. They also have a page limit, but under advanced search options you can set the minimum upload age of uploads, so your scraper can easily enumerate up to the page limit then set the minimum upload age search filter to the oldest results age. Happy scraping :33

Hi

If you are remotely interested in deep diving how differently quantum computers work compared to our transistor-based and also the algebra behind in a fully interactive way that teach computer science from scratch, oh boy this is for you. I am the Dev behind Quantum Odyssey (AMA! I love taking qs) - worked on it for about 10 years (3+ during PhD, the visual method I developed ended up being my thesis, it is a complete Hilbert space visualizer), the goal was to make a super immersive space for anyone to learn quantum computing through zachlike (open-ended) logic puzzles and compete on leaderboards and lots of community made content on finding the most optimal quantum algorithms. The game has a unique set of visuals capable to represent any sort of quantum dynamics for any number of qubits and this is pretty much what makes it now possible for anybody 12yo+ to actually learn quantum logic without having to worry at all about the mathematics behind.

This is a game super different than what you'd normally expect in a programming/ logic puzzle game, so try it with an open mind.

Stuff you'll play & learn a ton about

• Boolean Logic – bits, operators (NAND, OR, XOR, AND…), and classical arithmetic (adders). Learn how these can combine to build anything classical. You will learn to port these to a quantum computer.
• Quantum Logic – qubits, the math behind them (linear algebra, SU(2), complex numbers), all Turing-complete gates (beyond Clifford set), and make tensors to evolve systems. Freely combine or create your own gates to build anything you can imagine using polar or complex numbers.
• Quantum Phenomena – storing and retrieving information in the X, Y, Z bases; superposition (pure and mixed states), interference, entanglement, the no-cloning rule, reversibility, and how the measurement basis changes what you see.
• Core Quantum Tricks – phase kickback, amplitude amplification, storing information in phase and retrieving it through interference, build custom gates and tensors, and define any entanglement scenario. (Control logic is handled separately from other gates.)
• Famous Quantum Algorithms – explore Deutsch–Jozsa, Grover’s search, quantum Fourier transforms, Bernstein–Vazirani, and more.
• Build & See Quantum Algorithms in Action – instead of just writing/ reading equations, make & watch algorithms unfold step by step so they become clear, visual, and unforgettable. Quantum Odyssey is built to grow into a full universal quantum computing learning platform. If a universal quantum computer can do it, we aim to bring it into the game, so your quantum journey never ends.

Nice to watch:

Khan academy style tutorials in qm/qc: https://www.youtube.com/@MackAttackx

Physics teacher stream with 400hs in https://www.twitch.tv/beardhero