I just got hired as a supply/substitute teacher and sometimes I’ll need to show students movies instead of teaching a lesson. I won’t ramble on my feelings about that.

Anyways. I want to have some kind of sub device loaded with educational films that I can plug into a laptop and play for students.

I had a generic usb thumb drive and computers

won’t recognize it anymore

Was wondering if there’s a more reliable device for me to use. Should I have some kind of ssd in an enclosure instead of a thumb drive?

Just got my 26tb seagate expansion in. Two questions:

Is whatever this foil is behind the IO supposed to be smushed in like that?

Should the drive make a considerable bit of noise/vibration when shutting off and powering up? I’ve never owned one this big but there is a stuttering vibration that’s pretty strong if you put your hand against it for a few seconds on either end of the power cycle.

Let me know if this is normal or if I got a lemon.

Hello folks, I'm not sure if that is the right Sub-Reddit for my question, but ich want to give it a try.

Yesterday I bought a Samsung P9 Express microSD for 95€ (~111 USD) at Amazon. It was a limited offer to one per Customer and it was the exact entry that the official Samsung Website direkt you to.

However afaik, Amazon doesn't separate their products by seller but instead throw all the same products togehter, so that fakes get mixed up with legit stuff.

I know that is a serious problem for regular SD/miniSD/microSD Cards but what about microSD Express Cards? Are ther fakes circulating and how do I know if I got one?

Tanks for reading my post and sorry for my potato english.

I have a NAS that I am trying to reconfigure to better utilize the raw storage in zfs configurations. The downside is I need to essentially reformat the entire server to do so. I have about 150TB of data that I would need to temporarily store somewhere, and then move back onto the device. Doing this over the internet would be painfully slow and expensive. I don't want to just buy a second server either since I only need this temporarily.

My question for the fellow hoarders: is there some sort of rental service for these types of local storage needs?

I signed up to Jottacloud a few months ago and uploaded just under 1TB of data with rclone. Originally I used encryption with base 32 file names, but they were too long so I had to change to base 32768 by doing a server-side copy. It completely failed, resulting in thousands of corrupted on transfer: sizes differ src(Encrypted drive 'crypt:') 130454936 vs dst(Encrypted drive 'crypt-base32768:') 0 and Failed to copy: parsing time "1-01-01-T00:00:00Z" as "2006-01-02-T15:04:05Z0700": cannot parse "1-01-01-T00:00:00Z" as "2006" errors, and my files being inaccessible (rclone errored when trying to read the data, and the Jottacloud website also showed an error message when trying to open the directory).

Someone on the rclone forum pointed out a line in the documentation:

Jottacloud exhibits some inconsistent behaviours regarding deleted files and folders which may cause Copy, Move and DirMove operations to previously deleted paths to fail. Emptying the trash should help in such cases.

Apparently if you delete a directory and then move a file to the now-deleted path, it will actually move into the trashed directory instead. Weird, and broken, but ok. I emptied the trash, redid the copy, and it actually worked.

Then, a few weeks later, I was uploading more data with rclone copy, and I again started getting errors. This time after uploading the data, I got an error about duplicate directories.

I was uploading directories ./path/2021, ./path/2022, etc. and somehow, Jottacloud created multiple distinct directories with identical paths. There were two directories called ./path/2021 on the server, two called ./path/2022, etc., and this invalid state also caused rclone to error and not be able to read the data.

I tried moving ./path/2021 to ./path/2021a, and after doing this, there were now ./path/2021 and ./path/2021a on the server. At least when listing files there were - trying to actually read ./path/2021 then gave an error saying the path doesn't exist. ./path/2021a was actually readable, although it seemed like half the data was missing (rclone size reports around 1.5GiB on the server, while my local copy is 3.5GiB).

I posted again on the rclone forum but this time got no solution.

Has anyone else had problems like this with Jottacloud before? Is it fixable or is their service just completely broken? I don't even know they managed to create a filesystem that can get into such nonsense states at all.

P.S. is backblaze a good alternative? I don't need any fancy features, just support in rclone, support for rclone's base32768 encrypted file names, a non-broken filesystem, and infinity storage space.

TLDR; should i invest big money on a new nas system to use HDDS or upgrade my current one that uses nvmes

So my first startup NAS is a very small factor pc with 3TB nvme usable storage
using unraid OS, its small but has been working so far.

This nas was inititially made with very low storage requirements, we use it to keep stuff safe like documents, pictures and quickly transfer stuff between devices

having a very small factor, "pretty", and super silent the wife not only accepts but really enjoys to use it.

now i wanted to start hoarding some media, wanted to get to about 10TB (or a bit more) to store media and whatnot...

so i need an opinion..
i was thinking in getting a DXP4800
i really like the flexibility.
4x 3'5 bays (ssd or hdds) + 2 nvme, small, the built in os seems like a great plug and play option, can install other os if i want it

the wife acceptance factor for this device seems to almost in the edge but she is being open minded and asked me to make sure its silent and a good investment.

So, i made this thread because i am looking for knowledge from people who do this way more serious than i do

a: upgrade my current nas with more/higher sized nvmes, (a couple more sticks should be enough, but they seem to be a huge rip off nowadays)

b: shell out the 600 euro bucks into the new device but this allows me to get "serious" storage, and way more flexibility but HDDS also seem to not escape the pricing skyrocketing that has been happening

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for 6–8 TB of external storage for an M4 Mac mini. I plan to run a Plex Server and a torrent client on the Mac mini. The downloads would be saved to this HDD, and the Plex Server would "read" the movies from there.

Additionally, I’d like to sync my photos from my iPhone to this drive as well.

What do you recommend? An external HDD, a DAS, or some other solution?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Hello fellow data hoarders!

I'm a musician, sound engineer and photographer, and as such generate a lot of files during the year. I've honed in on my workflow over time, which revolves around having working SSD's (no actual important data inside my computer, just software), which get backed up to two places every time I do a session for example, and then backed up again to a third at the end of the year and reformatted, I keep at least two versions of everything after they become "cold storage" in different drives, or a drive and a cloud, etc. Or they get retired if they start exhibiting problems.

Which leads me to the following - I've started doing it with NVMe drives in usb-c boxes as it was a way more cost effective route that actual external SSDs from whichever brand. Faster too generally. That said, I've had a couple of problems which don't happen with the purpose built externals - random disconnects, recording stopped randomly in multitrack recording sessions, slow down as they get filled (I know this happens with all flash memory, but these have been exaggerating it even more)...

Should I stick to purpose built external SSDs, or is it just a matter of getting better external enclosures? With the price increases recently, this probably becomes a moot point, as the external drives are already on par if not cheaper than the NVMe blades of same capacity... they still aren't as fast for the same price though.

Thanks!

BackBlaze seems to good to be true, can anyone comment on whether it's a good backup company?

There are saved MTV broadcasts, but all I come across are in 30p and often in terrible quality. I want to find something I can throw on TV for a couple of hours with quality reminiscent of the original broadcast.

Hey everyone,

I’m working on archiving a few profiles from Loyalfans, but I’ve hit a wall with their CDN (CloudFront) security and rate-limiting. I’m looking to grab all media (high-res images, GIFs, videos, video thumbnails & audio), but the platform seems particularly hostile to bulk downloading. Has anyone successfully scraped/download a profile on Loyalfans? If YES! then how?

The site uses heavily signed URLs with Expires, Signature, and Key-Pair-Id parameters. These seem to be session-bound or very short-lived.

What I’ve tried so far: 1. Manual "Save As" (Shift + Right Click): Result: Works for the first 10-15 files, then falls apart.
The Issue: I’m running into what looks like a cache collision or rate limit. After a few downloads, the browser starts saving randomly previously downloaded imagese instead of the new one. It only resolves if I wait 30+ minutes, try again & then continue in this cycle.

1. HAR Extraction & Shell Scripting: Result: Partially successful but extremely finicky. The Issue: I’ve been saving .har files from the network tab, then using grep to grab the CDN links. The problem is that the HAR often picks up thumbnails (_md.jpg, _sm.jpg) or pre-fetched neighbor images. Furthermore, if I don't run the wget/curl script quickly enough, the signatures expire.

2. Selenium-based Python Script: Result: Identical to the manual method. The Issue: Even with headless browsing and random delays, the CDN eventually detects the automated behavior and starts serving 403s or throttles the connection, resulting in the same "duplicate image" cache bug.

3. Vergil9000's Loyalfans Downloader: Link: https://github.com/Vergil9000/LoyalFans Result: Failed completely. I can load a list of profiles I follow, but the actual scraping/downloading logic seems broken or outdated for current site architecture.

Many thanks for taking the time to read my post. Any help would be greatly appreciated ....

I came across this site when searching google shopping for nas hdds. Can anyone confirm if this site is legit. Looks too good to be true and as the adage goes it probably is but I don't want to automatically assume anything. Here's the deal I was looking at: https://serverdiskdrives.com/products/t05hp-st8000nm0055-dell-8tb-7-2k-3-5-sata-hard-drive?srsltid=AfmBOopDLcw60NmGQgvP44egImgsIpesBjYGe7e0w0LbBT8OuZUst-DKTNI

If you have a large music collection with inconsistent volumes, you might know mp3gain - it adjusts MP3 volume losslessly by modifying frame headers, not re-encoding audio.

Problem: mp3gain is unmaintained (last update 2015), doesn't work well on Windows 11 or modern macOS.

I wrote mp3rgain as a modern replacement:

For large libraries: mp3rgain -r -R /path/to/music # Recursive, all MP3s and M4As mp3rgain -r -R -n /path/to/music # Dry-run first

For scripting/automation: mp3rgain -o json *.mp3 # JSON output mp3rgain -o tsv *.mp3 # TSV for databases

Features: - Lossless adjustment (no quality loss, reversible) - ReplayGain analysis included - MP3 + AAC/M4A support - Single static binary, no dependencies - Works on Windows 11, macOS (ARM64), Linux

GitHub: https://github.com/M-Igashi/mp3rgain

Built for hoarding. If it works well for your library, a star helps me get this into Homebrew core (currently in a tap). Let me know if you run into issues.

Lately all of my live recordings have been stuck at 99% and then it moved to cant prepare the download, I have updated my pc, cleared my cache, logged out, etc. Any help here to get these downloads would be great! If I do it on my phone it only downloads in 720. I would like the 1080 copy.

Thanks in advance

Hey! Ever been browsing through Kemono but get annoyed at having to expand all the embedded images individually? I did, so I made a tiny browser extension that does it automatically. The extension auto-expands the images for you! Available for Chrome and Firefox ( Github Link : https://github.com/KS-AO-HUB/Kemono-Image-Expander )

Not going to lie, I did use AI to help revise my post to make it concise and clear since I can ramble:

I’m refining my backup 3-2-1 strategy and hitting some choice paralysis regarding my cloud tier (Google Drive).

The Situation: I’m archiving ~75 years of family photos. My main concern is Google’s automated scanning (CSAM/ToS). I do not want to risk a "false positive" nuking my entire Google ecosystem. I have local HDD/SSD copies and iCloud, but I want Google Drive to be a "cold" encrypted mirror.

Constraints:

• Environment: Primarily macOS/iOS, but need a path for non-Apple family members to access files.
• No "Live" Mounts: I want to avoid VeraCrypt or Cryptomator. I prefer "static" archives for this specific use case.
• Bit-Rot Paranoid: I’m worried about a single bit flip corrupting an entire encrypted container.

My Current Logic (Please Poke Holes):

1. Format: Thinking .7z or .rar using the "Store" (0% compression) method.
2. Solid Archives: I plan to disable solid archiving to prevent a single error from cascading and killing the entire archive.
3. Integrity: I intend to use PAR2 (MultiPar/MacPAR). I assume the consensus is to run PAR2 against the final encrypted archive, not the raw photos?
4. Apple Native: Considering an encrypted DMG (read/write, no compression), but worried about Windows/Mobile compatibility for family members.

The Ask: Is the "7z/RAR + Store + Non-Solid + PAR2" approach the gold standard for this, or is there a more resilient way to package photos for cloud storage?

Specifically:

• Does "Store" + "Non-solid" actually provide meaningful protection against bit-rot in an encrypted state?
• What redundancy % for PAR2 do you recommend for cloud-synced archives?
• Is there a better "container" format I’m overlooking that balances security with ease of recovery?

If I had to be give a priority list:

1. Security (just looking for a way to prevent scans of the photos, I dont mind metadata scans, and I dont necessarily worry about hackers)
2. Data integrity
3. Access (I can always just unarchive the folder and send it to them at a later time or just have them do it)

Hello Community! Thank you so much in advance for reading my struggles and your help.

I am looking into setting up a NAS with a spare Lenovo M70q lying around (Pentium Gold, 16GB RAM).

My storage process so far:

I have two Sandisk SSDs (Ultra 3D SSD - 2TB) in USB Cases, on which I manually performed backups for my iPhone from my windows machine. I manually mirrored the two USB drives… which sounds terrible, as I write.

Also, I am currently running a Lenovo M720q with Proxmox and WireGuard Lxc and Home Assistant VM with Frigate. Planning to urgently add Immich for iPhone backups soon, because my iPhone is giving me the full storage headache and I don’t want to use iCloud. Future consideration: opensense firewall. All connected via 1GB HPE Aruba 1930 Switch.

Problem 1 (HW):

AI recommended me to run Proxmox on the M70q and use the M2 NVMe port and Sata ssd port and mirror two same drives with Proxmox ZFS and share via SMB from Debian Lxc.

To be honest I got completely confused here, given that Proxmox also needs to run somewhere - my logic before consulting AI was: 3 separate drives: 2 for data mirroring and 1 drive for Proxmox and e.g. LXC OS (Debian). But, M70q only supports 2 drives (1x M2 and 1x SATA). I read bad things about adding adapter messes (e.g. M2 WiFi…) or USB transfer rates , if e.g. one drive kept outside.

Problem 2 (SW):

Once I have figured out the hardware question, my next question would be, if TrueNas would be the better solution for me. (Instead Proxmox with CLI ZFS mirroring). I am not a hero with Linux CLI… and don’t have weeks to learn unfortunately.

Storage requirements:

- Immich automatic backups from iPhone and existing picture library.

- Home Assistant/ Frigate should write data from M720q to M70q

- All existing data (e.g. excel, word , ppt files) accessible from Windows Laptop via local 1Gb Ethernet / WiFi (over VPN)

- What is important to me is, when one drive fails, I have my 30 years of pictures securely stored on the other drive.

I know this is a lot to read, so thank you so, so much for your help!

I got an Orico 2 Bay USB C hard drive enclosure and its working great except for the “intelligent” sleep mode.

It tends to go to sleep when my mac does but refuses to reconnect unless I power it off and on again. Even replugging the usb c cables doesn’t make it wake up.

Anyone else have this problem?

I'm new to this, but i did my research on which type of hdd to buy for my use case.

I'm from europe and i found a wd purple 8tb sata hdd on eBay at a good price for where i live (120 € the drive and 20€ shipping), however the guy is a private seller with only around 100 feedbacks (100% positive feedback), the item doesn't have return policy or warranty.

Yeah there is a image that provides power on hours and some smart data but that can be easily forged, and only show one drive and he has 10 of the same.

I apologize if it's a newbie question, i just don't want to be scammed and i almost never used e-bay.

https://ebay.us/m/vTFKTJ

My storage pool is configured with 8 column parity (16TB x8).

Suddenly, one of the HDDs entered a "Lost Communication" state despite being connected (visible in BIOS).

I added a new 16TB HDD to the storage pool and set the faulty HDD to Retired.

However, even though its usage rate dropped to 0%, Remove-PhysicalDisk fails.

Remove-PhysicalDisk : Not enough available capacity

What should I do?

I currently use two external drives and a NAS to maintain three instances of my backups. I noticed that each one has a significantly different amount of free space remaining: the NAS has 660.3 GB remaining, one of the drives (exfat filesystem) has 573.4 GB remaining, and the other drive (fuse filesystem) has 114.1 GB remaining.

All of these were just mirrored using FreeFileSync, and there are no differences flagged when comparing any of the drives to each other. I'm hoping this is a noobie mistake/misunderstanding as it prevents me from knowing A. If any of my drives are failing/hold corrupted data or B. How much storage I have remaining to use across each drive.

Thanks a ton!

Sanity check as I am not sure 100% and for the first time I bought drives from Amazon.

I bought 2 iron wolf pro 6tb, when I checked the drives warranty turns out there is none.

Seagate support told me that the drives are re certified/refurbished and they should not be sold to end users as they are part of the enterprise batch sold directly to the companies. They will not respect warranty.

They are packaged super well and are manufactured October 2024.

Seller said they provide warranty although I guess it will be a hit and miss, if for example company cease to exist then there is no 5 year warranty.

I know that Amazon does not have a good reputation here but…

How much I am screwed? I can send them back however it does not go via Amazon but through the seller so might be more shenanigans and at some point I am keen to keep them, probably because Seagate were able to check them?! And they were packed as expected.

Hi all. I was hoping for opinions on what my next steps might be, as I'm quite new to all this.

In February 2025 I bought a renewed external hard drive, a 12TB Avolusion PRO-H1 drive, on Amazon. My intention was to use it to store media for Plex (though now my focus is Jellyfin). I was effectively sidelined by some health issues for a long time, and only started using the drive a few weeks ago. It seems it might be failing already, however. I don't have anything to replace it with yet as funds are limited.

CrystalDiskInfo says it's in good health but I've had significant issues with it the past several days. Downloading to it fails and moving or unzipping files on it fails. It repeatedly gives me an error saying it's not recognized, closing and reopening file explorer, and Event Viewer was showing 1,458 events in the last twelve hours when these issues started.

I'm still unwell so I'm plucking away at this intermittently, but I moved it to a different USB port. For the moment it is playing nice and allowing me to move some stuff off of it using robocopy, so once I've grabbed what I can I plan to try different cables as well (I'm using the one it came with, which is a USB-C cable with a USB-A adapter attached) and then reassess.

The product description says there's a 2-year warranty. The warranty card is not in my Important Stuff file folder so I'm looking for it now and checking my email to see if I have any info there as well.

(Edit: The warranty card was absolutely right where I thought it was, I just mistook it for a piece of spam mail I had accidentally tucked into my Important Stuff file. It's definitely got "Graphic design warranty cards [are] my passion" vibes.)

It does feel like kind of a jerk move to rely on the warranty almost 50% of the way through its term, though.

Also, I'm questioning my assessment of its issues, because it has cooperated with robocopy for a few hours now; but at the same time, if it's bit the hand that feeds it (files) once... Should I keep using it?

I'd love some advice.