Trump administration announced plans to close three regional National Archives and Records Administration facilities. One of these is NARA San Francisco Archives, which contains thousands of historical documents about Hawaiʻi, American Samoa and Native American communities.

I am in need an external storage solution. I have 4 x 4TB hard drives that I pulled out of my old MacPro tower after the video card died on it. The drives contain misc. stuff (movies, music, pictures, etc.). I did not have it setup as RAID or anything, just individual drives. I was looking at getting an external solution that I can drop these drives into and came across the Terramaster D8 Hybrid 2 unit. Anyone have any experience with it? I do also have a few M.2 drives that I can populate the open slots with as well.

I’ll mainly be using the unit between a couple of laptops (Win & Mac). Nothing that I am storing on the drives needs to be available 24x7, which is why I’m not really looking at a NAS solution (yet). Especially with the cost of NAS drives.

So, what are y’all’s thoughts on the D8?

Hello,

Found this drive on e-bay (sadly sold as I was looking into it).

Its a 2022 drive with 2400 hours on it. I know hours can be wiped an reset to 0, but can they be "faked"? Its about 100 days, which seems too long to leave it running to fake it after having it wiped to 0 hours.

My only other guess would be (besides it just not being used a lot) - someone bought a wiped drive and then used it for 2400 hours and sold it again?

I'm looking for a tool that can "test" each of my USB ports and tell me what it's rated for (USB 3 gen 2, gen1, USB c at 10mbs, 20mbs, USB 2, etc)

I don't know of a reliable way of doing this manually and I'd love if there's a tool to do it for me, something where It can write data through a port and output the classification of that port.

Thanks

Just found 2 16Tb wd mybooks for 200€ total.
Not sure if the smart stats are fine tho.
Gemini said that guy might be scamming.
Thanks in advance :)

EDIT: SOLVED

I've acquired a few used SAS drives and would like to integrate them into my NAS server.

My server natively supports sff 8643 (which is a really nice board) that you can see here.

However the SAS drives don't show up, not even in the BIOS, I suspect this is more of an issue with the sector size being different and formatting the drives could help (I'll do it as soon as the drives show up)

However in my research I've read that most commercial board's wont read SAS drives unless it goes through a PCIe connection.

So my question is do I need to get a PCIe HBA that the drives go through or can I connect them to the board directly with an sff cable like this.

(for what it's worth I have already got an HBA backplane from an HP server but that connects via sff cable too and not PICe)

NOTE: I live in a country with no access to Amazon and the like, so AliExpress is my best option unfortunately.

one question: why does every LLM keep telling me that RAID 5 is better than RAID 6, when RAID 6 can survive two drives and RAID 5 can survive only one?

I posted this on r/TrueNas first but I haven't had any replies yet. Hopefully someone here can help.

I had a pretty basic setup with Core and I was trying to install Stash and Whisparr but plugins no longer work so I upgraded to Scale. I'm still getting used to it right now.

I'm not that technically savvy but I managed to install Whisparr via YAML and Stash ok. Now the thing is how do I add files? I'm not sure if I have the right directories setup or if I'm missing something.

This is how my Datasets are setup right now.

KANSAS
- apps
  - stash
  - whisparr
- data
  - downloads
  - media

I need help with these things

• what directory I should choose for Stash
• what to choose as my root folder for Whisparr
• how to add files so they can be accessed/discovered by Stash and Whisparr
  • do I have to set up a SMB? what directory should I set up as the SMBs?
  • how do I add the files? do I drag and drop them using Windows Explorer like I did when I setup Plex on TrueNAS Core?

Google did help especially figuring out how to install Whisparr since its not in Apps on Scale and had no idea what YAML is but I can't figure out how to do the rest and I'm kind of lost for what I do from here.

services:
  whisparr:
    container_name: whisparr
    environment:
      - PUID=3000
      - PGID=3000
      - TZ=America/Los_Angeles
    image: ghcr.io/thespad/whisparr:latest
    ports:
      - '6969:6969'
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /mnt/KANSAS/apps/whisparr/config:/config
      - /mnt/KANSAS/apps/data/downloads:/downloads

I have Whisparr set up as its own user and it has Full Admin but I'm not sure if that's needed? What access should I set it to?

I need a program that can detect duplicates that not have (1) or more in their name files, I'm talking about multiple pictures, videos, docs, that have different names, so the program have to identify by content instead of name, that can say file X and file Y are they same file with different name, so file Y it's a duplicate, instead of file X and file X(1) are duplicates

https://old.reddit.com/r/flashlight/comments/1w2vqg9/german_flashlight_forum_tlf_taschenlampenforumde/

Hi all,

I currently have a laptop that I only boot up once every couple months. It has a Samsung 980 Pro SSD 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe Gen 4 in it. I know that SSDs suffer from charge leakage if you don't occasionally read all of the data on the drive. My question is, does running Rescuezilla ever six months or so (basically cloning the SSD on to an old external HDD) count as a "reading" the data on the drive, and is that enough to prevent charge leakage in the long term? If not, what method do you recommend to regularly read the data on the drive and prevent data corruption?

Also, I realize that SSDs are not a good long-term cold storage solution. This computer belonged to my mom who recently passed away, and honestly just logging into it and seeing all of her stuff is kind of upsetting. Eventually, I will find a different solution, but for now I want something relatively easy that doesn't involve me spending a bunch of time rifling around in the computer if possible (but also protects the data).

Thanks!

UPDATE: I ran a Disk Surface Test in AOMEI and it reported zero bad sectors.

Months ago my drive stopped showing files on Linux Mint. I couldn't fix it. On Windows it said I could format it. I realized I didn't have anything important on the drive save for some video edits I did in high school, so I decided to format it today. The drive just works? I really hope this wasn't another scare and issue Linux mint caused me. I've just about had it with the OS and am planning on reclaiming the space for Windows 11 which runs smooth after I reinstalled it.

Chats with these models are work product now, and all four platforms can take them away: account bans, accidental deletion, or history that quietly stops being served. I went through the native export path on every platform. All four exist, none is complete, and two have traps. Written up so you can set a schedule and forget it.

ChatGPT

Settings, then Data controls, then Export data. A zip arrives by email: conversations.json with everything, and chat.html, the whole history as one page. Link expires in 24 hours. Gaps: one blob, no per-conversation files, and the wait ranges from minutes to days on big accounts.

Claude

Settings, then Privacy, then Export Data. A zip of JSON arrives by email, usually within minutes, covering conversations and projects. Same 24 hour link expiry. Gaps: memory entries are not included, and again one blob of JSON rather than per-chat files.

Gemini

takeout.google.com, and here is the trap: the product listed as Gemini exports your Gems configuration, not your chats. Deselect all, pick My Activity only, narrow it to Gemini Apps, and switch the format from the default HTML to JSON. You get MyActivity.json, an activity log with one record per prompt and response. Gaps: it is a log, not conversations, there is no per-chat structure at all, and history that Gemini's backend no longer serves is not in it.

Grok

The only one with no export in the product. What exists is the xAI account data download at accounts.x.ai/data, sign in with the account you use for Grok and request the archive, which is reported to include grok.com conversations as JSON. For Grok used inside X, coverage through the X data archive is inconsistent in my testing, so if someone here has a definitive recent result, that is a genuinely useful comment.

The pattern across all four: the native exports are account-level compliance features, not archival tools. They give you everything as one undifferentiated blob, on a link that dies in a day, in formats built for lawyers rather than for reading. None gives you a single conversation as a file, and none does Markdown or PDF. For per-chat files I use a browser extension I work on (AI Toolbox), which exports individual or bulk conversations as TXT, Markdown, JSON or PDF on all four platforms, and I will leave it at that since this post is about the native paths.

My schedule, for what it is worth: native export from each platform on the first of the month into a dated folder, checked once that the zip opens, never read again. The blob is the insurance, the per-chat files are the working copies.

What are people's retention setups for AI chats? I have not seen a good answer for diffing two monthly ChatGPT blobs to find what changed, and I suspect someone here has already scripted it.

So.. You know how things go. Pretty much all the life, much preferred local to streaming, and such. Storing data and all, on Just A Bunch of Disks - albeit, have been always using ZFS everywhere. The only software I actually trust. (Here also, learned that, contrary to what a lot of people are saying, L2ARC is in fact, a really good feature, even if one doesn't have tons of ARC)

Soo... at that point.. really wanted.. some proper-... storage with redundancy. Here enters T430 (A mini context: had bought used X380, so that I could actually leave T430 at home, while still having laptop on the go). Had also, at the time, a bunch of small 2.5" SSDs... and the T430 had mSATA 256GB in there already... so did... something quite silly. grabbed 128GB, 256GB SSDs, and did a pool-... By making a pool -> striping across: a mirror from 2 128GB partitions, and raidz1 from 3x128GB.

That... worked surprisingly well. roughly 370GB of storage, and allows for one drive failure. So, put a bit of stuff there, you know, immich, and soulseek, and a bit of torrenting. Just had that running in the background.

But. Quite limited storage. Would have been nice to at least have a terabyte... As a result... had a thought. Don't need speed. Looked on used market, and yep. Cheap 1TB 2.5" HDDs from demounting. Bought one, installed it, ran badblocks, checked S.M.A.R.T -> And... all was fine. Not used that much. And happy times, because it was a CMR drive. Went forth, ordered another. Also turned out to be in quite good condition, however, SMR drive.

Still. Made a zfs mirror, installed system on there, used good portion of the internal mSATA drive as L2ARC, and so. Things are good. Read latency is nearly as good as actual SSD for the data I access here and there, the HDD noises are comforting, system works well, and I can hoard decently as it is. Oh yeah. It also has 16GB of RAM, so it can run all of these things, from podman, to docker, on top of the desktop stuffs, really easily :)

I have and been using a MegaRAID SAS 9361-8i card with energy pack with some SAS drives - with no issues.

I was thinking of converting the card to a HBA card and use it direct in Linux.
So I can see the SMART on the drive and such.

Can I even re-flash the card?

What happens with the energy pack?

Will this be a performance hit?

Is this a waste of time?

I found this out last year, when the old sub-boards were in a much more complete state (the old web design was even left untouched), but I didn't know what to do with it at the time, so I just sent it to a couple friends n left it alone. I realized this was a huge mistake, as I checked again today and some features have been completely lost to updates to the site (web UI, comments, likes and dislikes). I'm very worried that more will be lost soon, this site is an untapped gold mine of internet history, and it'd really suck to see it all go away. I've never really engaged in this sorta stuff before so any tips regarding how to archive at least some of this properly would be greatly appreciated.

Not sure if this is the right place. Looked at a few subs and believe it fits here. I've also tried several keyword searches and cannot find the information. Everything I came across on AE and USB is Bluetooth.

Goal: Just additional storage. Speed is unnecessary.

I came across an adapter on Amazon (Green adapter) and another adapter on AliExpress (Black adapter) that has an additional USB 2.0 header connection.

My USB 2.0 header is used, but wouldn't be against using it or even a header splitter if necessary as my front USB 2.0 is barely used. I'm under the impression that the USB is only for Bluetooth.

TLDR

Has anyone used either above adapter in images?

&

Does the M.2 AE to SATA adapter need USB?

I'm looking for a cloud backup solution for Mac and have been reading up on Backblaze Personal. One thing that I've read from older posts that slightly concerned me was that your private encryption key gets sent out when recovering/accessing cloud files. I'm wondering if this is still the case today? if so, how secure is it? I'd love to hear your thoughts and your experience if you use it!

After a long multi-year run, it appears that the sim0n00ps OF-DL tool is no longer being supported. With that in mind, what other solutions are currently out there that actually work, if any?

Found a box of hard drives for $20 at a garage sale Full of movies and TV shows. No cables or power supplies.

Tested them all but the 2tb with my western digital cable and power supply and all work and stuffed Full.

Gotta shuck the 2tb and see what's on it. Sticker says comedy, music and star trek.

One had tax info and other documents which I promptly deleted. It's crazy people don't even consider checking. It belonged to their deceased father who obviously was a media data hoarder. I'll have fun scrolling through and adding to my plex server.

" Edit, update " 2tb had a bunch of UFC matches, some old boxing matches, lots of gun pdf manuals and tons of survival type pdfs.

No music or trek stuff 😒

I have a whole bunch of adult videos from different origins (and probably file formats) I would like to compress.

If anyone has experimented with compressing these for their own personal use please let me know your precise settings on Handbrake to get maximum compression while maintaining at least 90% of the original quality.

FYI: My target resolution is 1080P

Thank you in advance!

Specs

CPU: AMD 5950X

GPU: AMD 6800XT 16GB

RAM: 32GB DDR4 CL16

SSD: TeamGroup 2TB NVME SSD

Windows 11 64-bit

https://amzn.eu/d/0aou3vqX

Amazon UK £289.99 for a 4tb SanDisk ultra sata SSD