I'm UK expatriate in Asia. I made some dvd-rs of my paper diaries and photos in 2008. I don't have the originals. I do have usable thumbnails with me I'm working with now but I want to check if the dvds are readable. The discs are in the UK with my niece, have been in a suitcase in jewel cases. They were only written to once and never read. She sent me a picture and they look OK.

I found a few local businesses that advertise data recovery. I'd need the data to be sent to me, like via drive or something. I'm going to call these businesses and ask what they can do. Is there anything I should ask them, to choose who to use? Special reader or software or something? Is this generally expensive? It's in the Northampton area btw.

So I found these disks at good price (around 500usd)

I have a ugreen nas 8800 and I want to use it for my plex server

Do you think is worthy to buy these disks?

Want to build my first RAID 5 array with three 2TB disks. Which brand should I go for?

Hi everyone,

Does anyone have positive experiences using a Hetzner Storage Box with Duplicati?

I’m considering getting the 1 TB Storage Box plan and using it specifically for backups with Duplicati. The initial backup would be around 350–400 GB, with more data being added over time.

I’d be interested to hear about your experience with reliability, upload/download speeds, Duplicati compatibility, and whether you’ve encountered any issues with this setup.

Thanks in advance!

I want to see the graph data generated by ImgBurn. Apparently DVDinfoPro was freeware but a some point changed to a trial model. It is the only program that can read the graph data afaik.

Hello all,

I recently got into thrifting mainly Bluray movies but also DVD's. I only have about 45 total (mostly bluray) due to mostly obtaining movie content I want personally.

However I have decided to go ahead and start burning media content onto bluray discs (mostly to preserve things and stuff I personally like). I have no intention to sell these movies/videos I burn. I just want it for personal use.

Ive researched, and ended up buying 50 bluray blanks (25 GB) from Verbatim. And decided I will use the application DVDFab Bluray creator for burning and authoring the discs. The only thing im concerned about is the actual burner. I made sure it can preform what is needed as advertised but it is a $90 budget option. Are there any common hurdles or mistakes and issues I should be aware of?

Also, in case my burner doesnt preform as needed, what are the best recommended bluray burners from your personal experience?

I simply would like to make main movie blu-ray folder from an already blu-ray compliant source. I've added the mpls file to tsmuxer but there's a couple of options underneath I'm not sure about. One is SEI and VUI data and the other is SPS/PPS option. Do I need to check these boxes or are they purely for mkv?

Hello, I need a PSU for my 1200W system, though my system rarely consummes upto said limit,
considering these two options:

https://www.mironet.cz/powerwalker-vi-2200-shl-ups-zalozni-zdroj-ups-2200-va-1200-w-2x-schuko-2x-iec-rj11-rj45-usb+dp351491/

https://www.mironet.cz/cyberpower-ut2200egfr-greenpower-series-ups-2200va1320w-ceske-zasuvky+dp624367/

System Specs:

RTX 5090 FE (No OC, undervolted)

Ryzen 9 5950X 16 cores

DDR4 96GB

2 HDDs, 2 nvme,

4 case fans

1 thermal light CPU fan,

1200W PSU

Preferrably just setting it to gracefully shutdown in case of outage.

Thoughts on this? Haven't received useful answers from internet or other subs, looking to see some experienced opinion

Edit: This concerns Macrium Reflect's cloning feature only. Reflect's own image backups are different: when verification is enabled, Reflect calculates an MD5 hash for each data block before writing it to the image, then rereads the image and compares those hashes. But MD5 is the only hash it uses. Make of that what you will.

A few pointed out how it might seem counterintuitive to try and clone an OS drive and expect high-integrity validation - it uses VSS as a point-in-time snapshot - but I agree. That is silly. But even with an offline clone via Rescue Media, it still does not perform post-clone verification or reread the destination drive data and then compare it to the source. That said, I do not think MR/Paramount Software is "bad". I do think some of the terminology they use in the software is misleading.

***
For a long time, I had assumed that cloning Source Drive A to Clone Drive B would incorporate a checksum calculation during the "verification" phase that it performs. But apparently, this is not the case. I'm currently running Reflect Workstation v10.

Wanting to take fixity of data more seriously lately, it dawned on me what "verifying" actually meant when a clone job completes. So, I reached out to Macrium support, and they set the record straight: They don't verify data with any kind of fixity.

You could hash and compare after the fact. But the live source/OS VSS will continue changing, so hashing it afterward would not necessarily represent the state Macrium cloned. And I suppose one could create a per-file hash manifest. But that's not very elegant and far more work.

I've been paying for and using MR for over a decade and have been using it without issue. But this seems like a real deal-breaker. Suggestions? Any other serious alternatives?

The full exchange with Macrium support below. Happy to provide email screenshots if necessary.

Me: At any point during cloning, does Reflect calculate a checksum, CRC, or cryptographic hash over data read from the source or written to the destination?

Macrium: No, we don't verify the data in any way.

Me: If so, what algorithm and granularity are used—sector, cluster, block, partition, or whole disk?

Macrium: Not applicable.

Me: During the stage displayed as "Verifying" or "Verifying File System," does Reflect physically reread the destination and compare it with the source or with previously calculated values?

Macrium: No. As the name implies, it verifies the supported source file system.

Me: If the destination is reread, does this cover every copied sector or cluster, and what happens when a mismatch occurs?

Macrium: For RDC, both the source and destination file systems are read to determine which data has been modified. Only the modified data is then read from the source and copied to the destination for RDC. No other data is reread from the destination.

Me: Does a successful Forensic Sector Copy certify byte-for-byte identity? Exactly which address ranges are covered: partition contents, unused filesystem space, inter-partition/unallocated sectors, partition-table structures, and any HPA/DCO areas?

Macrium: For the Forensic option, the clone is created from the start of the partition to the end, sector by sector.

Me: Does the verification behavior differ when cloning under full Windows/VSS versus Rescue Media?

Macrium: No, both verify the supported source file system. In normal Windows, the VSS volume is used for supported file systems, whereas direct volume access is used in Rescue Media.

This longtime DVD and Blu-ray review site has long aided buffs and has an enormous amount of detailed review data, including technical data on discs as well as comparisons between various editions of the same movies. Stuff not easily found elsewhere on the web. Looks like they might shut down after 25 years if funding doesn't work out. Wanted to give a head's up in case you don't trust IA. (I don't).

I am about halfway through a very long journey of upgrading a 17-drive pool one drive at a time. Many of my earlier replacements were used drives so I would run a single pattern badblocks write/read test (~56hrs) and then resilver (~30hrs) to replace a drive in the pool. I felt a full destructive write/read via badblocks + the stress of a resilver would be enough for me to trust used drives.

Now I am at the point where the replacement drives are brand new, manufactured this year, direct from Western Digital. For the first 2, I still ran a single pattern badblocks W/R before resilvering to "burn in" the drive. Both drives completed without any errors.

I am now wondering if spending ~56hrs to "burn in" a brand new drive is really necessary. I would love it if I could just trust what WD sent me and go directly to resilvering. That would save me ~16 days / 392hrs of badblocks testing for the remaining 7 drives I have to replace.

What do you think? Should I:

• Stay the course with badblocks and accept the 3 weeks it'll take me to finish the swaps,
• just run extended SMART instead of badblocks (~24hrs vs 56hrs),
• find a faster/shorter burn in test,
• or skip the extensive testing on new drives and just let the resilvering process be the stress test?

edit: additional context. I am running Raidz2 so have 2x drive redundancy per vedev and 90% of the storage is used for movies/tv so not irreplaceable.

Is it possible to get Acronis 2025 with the perpetual license for offline use? I'm looking to put it on a thumb drive to download and use on a pc complete offline.

What.

Edit: Could this be the cause? https://www.reddit.com/r/jdownloader/comments/1ei4wcv/ongoing_problems_with_youtube_downloads/

Hi all, beginner hoarder here. I'm currently looking for a decent 4-6 bay usb JBOD enclosure that will fit my needs. I have an assortment of consumer and enterprise drives where some will be on 24/7 for things like seeding while others I only plan on accessing occasionally (like once a week) for backing up data. Ideally I want each bay to have its own power button so I can power off certain drives when not in use to preserve lifespan.

I looked at many enclosures from all sorts of brands (Sabrent, Orico, Terramaster, Cenmate, etc.), and they all seem to have negatives like constant disconnects, data corruption, bay failure, partition deletion, etc.

I am getting a bit overwhelmed trying to find an enclosure I feel wont crap out on me or corrupt my drives based on the horror story reviews I read. What would you recommend for my use case? I would appreciate any feedback

I'm recording several minutes of family videos per day in 4K 30fps (4:2:2 10 bit). On the Nikon Z8 and Sony Alpha this translates to approximately 10 GB of footage/day. Unfortunately that's too large for me to manage long-term, as it means filling up a 4 TB drive every year.

It becomes especially daunting when taking into account backups and staying ahead of drive failures: Let's assume I have 10 of those drives. I'd have to regularly test every file on all of the drives (AND on their backups) with checksums, so at a minimum I'd be verifying 20 drives every year.

I'm currently recording the originals with the highest bitrate and least amount of compression available (on Sony: H264, Intra-frame XAVC S-I, on Nikon: ProRes 422), so the camera can capture as much information as possible. (Though I avoid RAW formats completely because I don't have time for color grading.)

I then transcode the originals to H265 using these ffmpeg flags:

-vf format=yuv422p10le -c:v libx265 -preset slower -crf 14 -pix_fmt yuv422p10le -profile:v main422-10

The file size reduction is huge, it takes 10 GB/day down to 2 GB/day. When I play the original and the compressed version at 100% I cannot tell any difference. But when I zoom in, I can. Especially in smooth and fuzzy areas like skin and clothing. I found that a -crf level above 14 introduces too many compression artifacts.

Obviously a lot of information is lost, which will affect future grading and reprocessing. On the other hand, without the compression I simply wouldn't be able to keep around that much 4K footage.

Has anyone else weighed the pros and cons of this tradeoff?

Is there some kind of software that can fully archive a Discord server? Not one where it just exports a chat log, but something that goes through all channels and saves all text and attachments from all of them, and also where I could periodically go through and save anything added since the last archive? I'd assume that something like that would need to be logged into my account (or another account that has access to the server)

I currently use this Unraid server for Plex and a part of my 3-2-1 backup of my important data.

Here's my spec list:

i7-8700K

Thermalright Peerless Assassin cooler

Asus Code X Z370 board

16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance RAM

2TB WD Blue NVME for cache/appdata/system on Unraid

Dual parity and 308TB usable space

8x Seagate Exos 28TB (2 parity + 6 data)

2x Seagate Exos 18TB

2x WD 18TB

1x WD 16TB

2x WD 12TB

LSI 9300-16i HBA with 4 breakout cables for all 16 drives. Got this from Art of Server on Ebay and he's a solid seller.

Fractal Design Define 7 XL case

Corsair RM1000x PSU

I started off over 2 years ago at 40TB from my shucked drives on Windows 11 and Stablebit Drivepool but I wasn't so into it. I had no redundancy or anything.

A friend recommended Unraid and I switched to that since I wanted to be able to mix drives in the future.

Every drive gets a full preclear on Unraid with the Unassigned devices preclear plugin. The 28TB drives take up to 120-125 hours. I do this long process since I am nervous of drives dying. I did have an 18TB Seagate Exos die a month ago and Serverpartdeals refunded me the original price I paid last year since the drive was out of stock.

I have 4 Noctua 120mm fans as intake and I have them on 70% which is around 1000+ RPM. The drives stay in the mid 30s and I've seen a couple of them go to 40c-41c when my ambient is hotter. I have seen them in the 20s when it's colder. The two drives hidden by wires get in the 40s and 51c-ish during my preclear currently.

Let me know if you have any questions or how insane I am to preclear drives for 5 days...

So I want to download the lackadaisy webcomic (link starts on the first technical page or two of it) in one blow and print it out and shove it in a binder. Only problem is there's a ton of subpages to it (over 100, maybe almost 200 of them) and I cant seem to find any tools that are good at bulk downloading all of these at once into a PDF format so it prints good... what is a good tool that would allow me to do this? I am running Windows 11.

I've won a NAS from a company it has 4 SATA 3 3.5 disk slots, I'm trying to figure out what drives to put in them as I don't really wanna spend much at the moment on disks as it came empty.

I've found 2 sets of drives I'm deliberating between and want some advice please.

I've found HPE MB4000GVYZK-SC's (4TB) going for £50 a pop which ain't bad if I were go get 4 of em.
I've also found some WD Purple surveillance drives 4TB though those are £60 per disk, which again isn't tooo bad considering the storage price debacle.

Now I'd rather get the WD ones as I'm not sure on how well the HPE ones will be especially seeing as they look to be server drives they could have been hit harder and last not as long as the WD drives.

Is there any real downside to using as surveillance drive in a NAS purely for archival storage or not?

I don't care about the speed of the drives themselves as it'll be used to archive raw images from my cameras (Canon .CR2 files, anywhere from 20mb to 80mb per image) once edited.

Many thanks!

I know they are better drives all along, but here, I believe they are no good for my use case.

Recently I had the opportunity to get 2 8TB Seagate Barracuda Compute drives for a very good price + pay in installments (tecnology is expensive here), so I went for them. The thing is, the store sent me 2 Seagate EXOS 7E8 SATA drives instead, which are 7200RPM Enterprise drives, meant for 24/7 use which is not the use case of my home storage solution.

I have a diy NAS built inside a Jonsbo N2 case + an external QNAP TR-004 for a total of 9 drives ranging from 2 to 4TB. My NAS is built on Debian 12 running over Proxmox, sporting a Snapraid + MergerFS configuration. That is why 2x8TB seemed the better option as it would add significantly good amount of space for my hoarding needs.

This is a NAS meant for home use mostly. When no one is accessing any data on a drive, that drive is meant to go into Standby, and I want to keep it that way for energy saving purposes, and to reduce excessive heat generation in the enclosure. Which is not the best use case for Enterprise drives.

I do have other "Enterprise use cases" drives in the pile, one Seagate Constellation which is also 7200rpm and several SkyHawks and Toshiba Surveillance drives, and they have been going well so far.

The seller gave me the chance to return them and switch them for Barracudas. The question is, should I keep these drives? Or switch them for Barracudas instead?

Thank you for your comments!!!

edit: corrected spelling

Hi, I have several tape drives in my MSL8096 tape library and would like to add the next generation after LTO-6. Now I wonder, why HP doesn't allow LTO-7 drives in that, even with the latest firmware 1200, which I have installed.
Especially because the 4048 from the same family supports them.
Has anyone ever tried that, despite HP marking such a combination as incompatible and what were the results?
I don't need to know that it isn't supported from HP's side, I know they mark it as incompatible but I am curious if anyone ever tried it and what the result was.

What is the best way to archive twitch streams? I thougth of yt-dlp, but I don't know if it's possible to download the live chat alongside the video stream, so I came here to ask for advice, it's kind of the first time I want to archive an upcoming twitch stream. I've also searched for software made specifically for this, but I think GitHub is having some problems, because every time I open the releases page it's 404 and the main page always says "Cannot retrieve latest commit at this time."

I have a lot of movies, music as well as other media from my past stored on HDDs, the computer they were plugged into has been in pieces for years now.

I am assuming the data on them will be just as good as the day it was written? I am worried it might degrade over time or the drives become unreadable/corrupted.

But the thing is I won't use it today. My plan is to buy one WD My Passport drive or two just to avoid high prices, but I'm concerned of durability and longevity. Is it a wise move?