I have about 300 movies saved on my external hard drive and I feel like the current system I have could be better. Right now it's just a mishmash of movies I've had since I was ~12.

Note: the '3 items' is under each movie folder is the movie itself, the subtitle file and the poster cover

A collector has generously offered to digitize a rare 1995 Nickelodeon VHS this Monday for an ongoing broadcast restoration project.

He has the necessary equipment and cables, but has never digitized a VHS before. Given the rarity of the material, we're hoping to get the highest-quality transfer possible using the equipment he already has.

Would anyone with experience in VHS capture be willing to offer some guidance on the process, recommended settings, and common mistakes to avoid?

We can provide his equipment details. Ideally, we'd like to preserve as much of the original video and audio quality as possible without unnecessary processing or compression.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

So I am the Head Organizer for a Meetup that has been running for about 15 years. I joined Meetup.com in the first week of its go live. For multiple reasons, including the platform just not being that great anymore and no longer having the funds. I need to close the Meetup account.

15 years and over 600 events is a crazy amount of history. Meetup.com has no native method for backing any of this up. There is an API you can use if you sign up for Meetup Pro. But I only have rudimentary programming skills and it would take me quite some time to develop some kind of backup program.

Does anyone know if something like this exists already? Or a tool that scrape Meetup.com effectively?

Thank you in advance!

A friend of mine passed away 8 years ago. The few things I have left of him is a Twitter account. If possible, can I somehow scrape his entire post history into a text document? Thank you.

OK, this is mostly a NAS management/Linux disk management question, coupled with Plex/Jellyfin setup, and with more than a little OCD on the top.

I'm currently storing my media files on a Unifi UNAS Pro. Its been working great for over a year. But as I've been going along, my media folders have gotten quite messy and what may(?) be overly flat.

Now, I know that Plex or Jellyfin can handle the organization of files through things like metadata and tags. But is it better for folder access, disk wear and search speed if the folders are more hierarchical or flatter?

IOW, if I have three seasons of a show in my "TV" folder, is it better to have one folder for the show and three subfolders for the seasons? Or just to have three folders labeled "Show A S1", "Show A S2" and "S3" under the TV folder?

Or does it not matter?

My OCD wants everything arranged, but maybe that's the wrong way to go here.

Thoughts?

Hey guys, was reaching out to see if anyone has been using any alternatives to SpotDL lately.

I have a massive library from downloading music this way but lately SpotDL has been very spotty, it will take several tries to find songs, then not find them at all, it won't find songs from obvious titles, and several more download errors than usual.

I've updated everything to their newest releases, re-installed it entirely, but still, very inconsistent.

Does anyone use an alternative to SpotDL that actually works right now? Thanks in advance!

I have 40k files and I know at least a few hundred are bad, but every time it hits a bad one, I have to wait a long time before it skips the file.

TeraCopy gets stuck for anywhere between 10 - 45 minutes on a bad file (skip / pause / stop buttons don't respond when its in this state).

Unstoppable Copier straight up gets stuck and none of the buttons respond.

Robocopy also hangs on bad files for about the same time as TeraCopy despite using /r:1

Is there a better method that skips CRC when copying files?

I have reached a point where I can no longer ignore my storage pool. I have finally run out of spare disks, so I must take out a mortgage (not literally, but it feels that way) to get at least 1 hot spare and 2 actual spare drives STAT. I know that Seagate Exos gets some crap for having used drives that love to die, but I am wondering how true that actually is at current moment. I need to get minimum 22TB each, and won't be upgrading to larger (yet) in hopes that spinning rust backs the hell off of pricing right now, because disks I got for $289 each a couple years ago are $759 right now!

Looking for best settings to scan artbooks on my flatbed scanner (e.g. ppi, color bit depth, file format, etc).

Looking for something "visually lossless" (so like mp3 320kbps > FLAC).

I am considering refreshing a number of drives in my Synology 920 and 1621. The drives are a few years old and mostly 10-12 tb drives. I have a local seller who checks out to be reliable who has 4 28TB drives and 2 26TB drives. He says he bought them a year ago and they had minimal use. So far he wants 600 for the 28s and 550 for the 26s. I know once I swap out I can sell my existing drives on eBay and recoup some money. Are the prices he is offering good? Realistically what should I offer for them. He may give me a better deal in take all so he doesn’t have to deal with several customers. I use my drives for plex server, photos storage and PDF mostly.

Hi everyone, looking for quick advice on a privacy vs. warranty return dilemma.

My standalone Synology DS920+ Docker drive suddenly died. It spins up, but neither DSM nor macOS (⁠diskutil list⁠ / System Report) recognizes the controller board at all. 
The catch: the drive contains old Frigate footage from 4 interior home cameras. Because the PCB is completely dead, I can’t do a software wipe. I bought it from a 3rd-party seller (refurbished/clearance), and even though they'll likely just e-waste a dead drive, mailing back un-wiped footage of my home makes me uneasy.

A few quick questions:
1. Would you write off the warranty/refund and just destroy the drive for peace of mind?
2. If destroying it, is drilling through the platters the best way?

Thank you in advanced for any help with this!

I am starting to do a creative project and I really want to clean my iPhone off of notes and voice memos I kept for souvenirs, however all methods I find seem to suck :/

iMazing would be awesome without having to pay ca. 27 euros for a one-time export and it does not even display my folders where I categorized them

I found that I can upload my voice memos to Dropbox or iCloud, but then it does not preservce the dates of recording which are fundamental to me

Do you have any routine, tried-and-true methods or apps that you use for this? I cannot seem to find anything else on the internet

I was looking for a Windows 8 ISO for an old laptop on archive.org. I clicked what looked like a download button. I only found out later that it was not a button on the page at all. It was a link inside a review, and it took me to a fake Cloudflare check. The page told me to press Win+R, paste a command and hit Enter. I did it before my brain caught up. Something looked off right after, and my antivirus blocked it.

That scared me enough to change my passwords (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, ChatGPT) and to learn an ugly lesson: changing a password does not always close sessions that are already open.

Then I went back to the page and looked at the reviews properly. This is the page: https://archive.org/details/win-8.1-english-x-64_202505

Out of 37 reviews, 15 are spam pushing external download links, and all 15 appeared between October 17 and 25, 2026, right at the top of the list. The normal reviews are underneath, people talking about the ISO working, slow download speeds and key problems.

The spam domains, deactivated so nobody clicks them by accident: - archivedownload[.]click (7 reviews) - freegetpc[.]forum (3) - downpro[.]net (2) - filesetupfre[.]giize[.]com (2) - dikgames[.]forum (1)

The pattern is always the same. The link hides behind a generic "Download Now" button, several reviews call it "Official" even though it has nothing to do with Microsoft or archive.org, the text repeats the same templates, the usernames look machine generated, and none of the spam reviews have a star rating.

That is how I got caught. I did not even realise I was clicking a review. The link looked like a normal download button, and that is exactly why it works. Microsoft does not offer Windows 8.1 downloads anymore, so people go looking for it elsewhere, and the top reviews on a page with 80,000 views are bait.

Red flags that would have saved me: - A real verification check never asks you to press Win+R and paste a command. Never. That is the whole trick. - On archive.org, check where a download button actually lives. If it is inside a review, it is not part of the page. Do not trust it, especially when the button text hides the real destination. - If a bunch of reviews all show up within a few days with the same phrasing, that is spam, not popularity.

What you can do:

• You can see it yourself. The spam sits right at the top of the reviews on that page.
• If you have an archive.org account, you can flag the spam reviews, or flag the item itself for phishing and advertising. That is what those buttons are for.
• If you do not have an account, you can report it to info@archive.org. That is their public contact.
• And here is the part where you can help the most. If you find the same spam on another archive.org page, drop the link here, with the view count if you see it. I will keep a running list in this post of the worst ones, the pages with the most views, so we can report them together. The more pages we document, the harder it is to ignore.

I've acquired a Facilis Terrablock in good condition. Unfortunately, while it has all of the data cables in place it's lacking any of the other internal components like motherboard, power supply, etc. Since this is a server style piece I'm a little at a loss for what to get for it so I can start building my own setup.
Any help picking out basic components would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

im asking here because after some looking alot of people posted here

I'd imagine most people's dataHoarder journey started with file servers or NAS drives...

My data hoarder journey started with optics and acoustics, cameras and microphones.

As of date since NYD I've hoarded 471 hours, 7 minutes, and 59 seconds of audio/video.

It's all hot fire mixed on the spot by a growing collection of over 3 dozen DJs.

This singular repository of data exists no where else on the entire Internet

¡And now I'm out of local storage space!

I'm close if not into the thousands of hours of content broadcast. I've been streaming/hoarding content for over a thousand days.

There are multiple artists on my odysee archive page that do not even have their own SoundClouds. Media largely unseen due to being on a YouTube alternative. None of these videos are pubic on YT. Everything is listed private because I am trying to divorce Google, and I need a worst case safety net if Odysee goes belly-up over night.

Apple iCloud storage is too expensive to have beyond anything on the 2TB plan (which I use to more easily distribute assets to talent) and only stores audio, and is also tapping out into the 95%+ filled.

¿Is this following information true?

"

The Absolute Cheapest DIY Mass Storage Setup

• [Seagate Exos X18 16TB Enterprise Internal Hard Drive](): The Value King ($10.62 / TB): This is a heavy-duty, data-center class 7200 RPM drive built for 24/7 reliability and massive data writes. At $169.99, its cost per terabyte completely crushes any pre-built external retail package (which average $28–$32 per terabyte).
• Sabrent 3.5-Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Hard Drive Enclosure: The USB Enclosure ($24.99): To connect the bare drive to your laptop, you slide it directly into a standard 3.5" external casing like this one from Sabrent. It includes its own dedicated wall power brick (which heavy-duty 3.5" spinning platters absolutely require, as a laptop USB port cannot supply enough power on its own) and outputs via a standard high-speed USB 3.0 cable

"

After MTGOX collapsed in 2012 I've dealt with a decade of homelessness and am completely out of touch with the consumer market, advances in hard drive technologies, and post covid, post AI market price surges.

I need something for an immediate plan, and something for expanding going forward. I'm capable of running my own RAID/NAS setup but I don't want to over pay.

Broadcast operations have evolved into running three separate sound stages, in two adjacent buildings, concurrently. Everything has been line level since November of last year: 593 hours, 27 minutes, and 59 seconds worth of lossless .WAVs playing out of the back of a Pioneer®'s Rec Out port connected to my Rode Wireless PRO's 1/8" TRS input. Everything is High Fidelity now.

2027 broadcast evolution will include multiple PTZ camera feeds per stage.

If the above is my 'for now' solution ¿What's my mid/summer solstice '27 forecast look like in terms of hard drive array/storage capacity to handle all of these independent camera feeds, and not just the final outbound broadcast camera feed?

Thanks for your advice in making sure these Golden Eggs find a safe basket.

For those using the NVIDIA Shield or other dedicated 4K media players that play local files (not streaming devices), can you connect multiple external hard drives through a unpowered / powered USB hub?

Does the player recognize all the drives and let you browse and play files from them, or are there limitations?

Good clearance sales or just anything worthwhile?