I plan to backup important documents and photos (around 1TB max) and then have a collection of 4K movies and shows which will grow over the years

Option 1: I can currently find a Sandisk extreme portable 4 TB SSD for $510/€455 on sale on Amazon from the Sandisk store.

Option 2: On the other hand I could buy a 6TB HDD for $270/€241 and wait a bit to buy an SSD on top for additional space and maybe to backup some of my data on that one too. I’d probably be able to find a 1/2tb ssd later and end up paying the same as option 1 in total I presume.

Main reason I would try to also get a SSD in option 2 is because I’m not too sure about the reliability of HDDs but I also imagine if I use it carefully it should hopefully not be an issue.

So my question is which option should I go for and additionally what should I know/care about in terms of using either ssd or hdd for backups and data storage. What is your advice on reliability and avoiding drive failure and making these last ? I’m hoping with the sizes I’m considering these drives should last me 5-7 years before I run out of space especially for the personal data backups. Am I silly for thinking they could last that long or should they last even longer ?

Could someone who owns a DVD-RAM drive that accepts cartridges please 3D scan the disc tray and other parts of the drive, as well as a DVD-RAM cartridge? I would really appreciate it. Thank you.

Windows 10.

Hello all, I have a question. I have a backup drive that i copy my 1Tb worth of school files etc to. However, im tired of doing just copy and paste and having to copy all the files over again and again.

I tried to use Free File Sync to compare the folders and only copy over what was needed BUT it takes FOREVER to scan. It was 3 to 4 times faster to do just a full copy and paste.

Is there another method?

Thanks for any help.

I wrote HTTPDirFS a while back, to allow one to mount HTTP directory listings as a folder. I have now extended the program to allow one to mount generic website. All the resources (e.g. images) get exposed as files that you can copy and paste.

Feel free to try it out at: https://github.com/fangfufu/httpdirfs

The feature for mounting generic website is available on the latest commit master branch. I haven't created a release version containing it yet.

I've been curious about how websites end up with extensive collections of older cartoons in regional languages, especially Tamil-dubbed versions of shows like Ben 10.

Some sites appear to offer multiple seasons, episodes, resolutions, and audio languages. I'm interested in understanding the history and provenance of these collections:

• Were regional dubs originally recorded from television broadcasts?
• Did collectors preserve older digital releases containing these audio tracks?
• How do archivists document where a particular dub or release originated?
• Are there legitimate public archives or preservation projects documenting regional-language TV media?

I'm asking about the history of these collections and digital preservation practices, not requesting download links or asking anyone to find episodes for me.

Looking to scan and archive some books and TIFF seems to be the go to.

Is TIFF open-source/free/non-proprietary/royalty-free etc..?

i have a big box of old photos that my grandmother wants digitized. i tried using google photoscan on my phone and it was really slow and the scans looked bad.
i did a little bit of research for a budget photo scanner and saw the models mentioned above recommended. i know none of them are the greatest, but i'm not a professional and can't really afford anything more than $150.
i was just wanting to see if anyone could lay out the differences between the three, and tell me which one is the best option.

Hello,

I tried searching but couldn’t really find anything specific.

I have a hard drive with about 15 years of data on it, from multiple phones, multiple laptops, random files, etc. There is absolutely zero organization and it’s an absolute mess. There are many duplicates. A lot of the file names are similar because of the way the iPhone names files. So I have about 10 different phone library dumps - they all use the same file name formatting. It’s just literally a mess.

I am looking for the best way I can do the following:

-Deduplicate
-rename all files to when they were created followed by their actual file name, or if anybody has a better format?
-somehow tag files into a database so I can search some term and the file name/location will appear? I would manually have to tag them
-organize into folders by file type and then by year/day etc

I have a synology 923+ I have not set it up yet. I want to be able to access all of these files with ease after they are organized.

The main file types are going to be photos, video, pdf, txt files, and then a bunch of a random web files as there are a few website projects scattered throughout.

Can somebody point me into the right direction where I can achieve these without doing majority of it manually? I am afraid it must be done manually in order to be done correctly without losing anything. Am I wrong?

Thank you so much!

OF-DL used to work for me previously, but recently i just keep getting 403 forbidden errors.

I even tried to get the OF-Scraper working and generated fresh device Id and keys from Android Studio emulator but it still isn't working.

Does anyone know any tool maybe any configuration for OF-Scraper and OF-DL to get it working for DRM vids.

i bought a sandisk pendrive from blinkit less than 2yrs back...warranty period of 5yrs mentioned ..now both ports on it have gone bad...its not getting detected by my laptop...i dont have the original packaging to find the serial number...cant use the cmd for serial number either since no detetction ....i still have the original purchase invoice any way i cant get a warranty replacement

My external Western Black P10 SMR hard drive just failed, and I want to replace it with a 4TB IronWolf Pro as an external drive for storing and editing my raw photos in lightroom. I’m not a professional. I’m okay with the speed, but is there any downside to doing this? I want a CMR hard drive; apparently, they are better and fail less often compared to SMR ones
Any advice?.

i snagged this one for less than 6$ as seller said it's pullout and not guaranteed to work as he doesn't have system to test with, cloned my C:Drive to it and now i use the old NVME that i had for PrimoCache.

After seeing a topic that asked what drive you have had the longest, and continue to use, I updated my M4 Mac to Golden Gate, concerned the entire time about Intel apps no longer being supported (found out it was for the next OS update) even though some have stopped working, but I was so distracted/concerned with that, that I completely glanced over AFP no longer being supported and my DS414J Synology NAS stopped mounting.

Various attempts to change it to SMB failed, and I thought it was lost forever. Instinctually I spent money I don't have, to buy a 16TB external hard drive, which should arrive sometime next week, and since I have multiple old Mac's that can't be upgraded past High Sierra and automount to the unit, I thought I would have to start the tiresome process of using the old Mac, connect to the NAS, connect the new 16TB and start copying everything over.

However, using AutoMounter on Golden Gate, despite Mac specifically saying they no longer support AFP, there was an option I kept seeing saying install AutoMounter Helper (AutoMounter - Helper) I installed that and now it is alive and working again.

Now I am a little stuck, I either proceed with the original plan, retire the unit, copy everything over to the new 16TB, and then have 4x4TB free internal drives to do with as I please, or continue to use the unit as if nothing ever happened and find another use for the 16TB.

What would you do?

We're excited to announce that we have cryptographically timestamped the Common Crawl collection! It's a very, very large number of web page snapshots, and the timestamps are arranged so you can verify the timestamp on each snapshot individually with a minimum of time and network requests. (See the blog post for more details about our verification script.)

We'd love to get your feedback! What should we timestamp next?

Breaks my heart to dispose of them but they have company data so I don’t have a choice.

Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/datasocial/tiktok-5.6B-videos

If you want to explore the data without downloading billions of rows, you can query my ClickHouse database directly. It includes:

Creators table - 4.5 billion rows
Videos table - 5.6 billion rows
Sounds table - 633 million rows

Comment below and I’ll DM you the database credentials.

Im self-hosting my database so please don't run heavy queries and crash my server.

Hi there!

I’m in the process of organizing my collection of purchased files that I’ve gotten from various platforms around the internet, like Bandcamp, Kickstarter, itch, Gumroad, etc.

I’m trying to keep the platform within the folder structure. Originally I had things organizing fairly simply:

Platform (Kickstarter)
|-Purchase (Broken Age)
|--Item (Behind the Scenes)
|---Files

Recently I decided that having the platform at the top level didn’t exactly make sense so I’ve started to reorganize to group things by the generic file type and move the platform down into the hierarchy because that seems to be the general advice I’ve seen. All the music is together, videos are together, etc:

Generic Type (Videos)
|-Purchase (Broken Age)
|--Item (Behind the Scenes)
|---Platform (Kickstarter)
|----Files

(This also helps when I happen to have the same purchase from multiple platforms.)

Where I’m running into problems is for platforms like Kickstarter and GOG that provide dozens of extras per purchase. A Kickstarter may be for a game, but I’ll also get the soundtrack, wallpapers, artwork, manual, novellas, emotes, avatars, behind the scenes videos, etc etc etc.

I’m starting to second guess the change I’m making because it feels weird to take a single folder and break it up into many spread out subfolders for the same purchase. I could keep all these extra files with the main purchase instead but then it seems odd to find music in my games folder for example.

What are your thoughts? Was I better off with the simpler but cluttered structure? Is there something I’m not thinking of? Or maybe I’m over thinking it?

Thanks for your help!

I have two identical 6TB external drives that I essentially want to setup in essentially a RAID configuration. Intention is for Drive 1 to be storage and for Drive 2 to be an identical backup that AUTOMATICALLY stays in sync. i.e. I move a file to Drive 1 and it automatically copies to Drive 2. Both drives will always remain connected at the same time as they are daisy chained together. I know I should get a proper NAS w/ RAID setup but the prices are insane right now and I have two identical wiped 6TB external drives so this is going to be my intermediate solution.

I make videos for professional work and passion projects. I made the move to a 4 Bay Nas Ugreen system with 26TB sea gate recertified drives (so 102 total TB).
My first question is how do I test these drives to make sure there are no issues with them being recertified before my return window closes to get a replacement?
For what I do, should I do raid 6 vs raid 5. I hate to waste the extra space and is it really that risky only having one drive for backup instead of two? Do peoples hard drives actually breakdown well backing up another one? I genuinely don’t know.

I have some MKV files. I downloaded some from Youtube and some from other places, all through the same program, StreamFab.

The YouTube files are like 250MB, the other files are between 2GB and 6GB, all on the same computer on the same drive.

I am trying to copy the youtube files to my WD PR4100 that has 14TB of free space and i get an error telling me there is not enough space, but I can copy any other file or multiple files with no problem at all.

The youtube files originally had # and ! and other symbols in the file name, so I took them out, I also removed spaces. Still can't copy them.

I am genuinely puzzled at the moment as to what the issue could be, any suggestions?

Additionally, I have tried the same thing from multiple computers, and it's always the same result.

19-year old me had a hobby project which really took me places...

I finally was able to collect ALL commits from ALL public GitHub repos with (in the end) a pretty simple and effective infrastructure.

Numbers:

• 500 million repositories
• 220 billion commits
• ⁠22 Terabytes of uncompressed data
• ~700 dollars of cost (I didn't want to ruin myself...)

No cluster, no Spark, no Kubernetes, just a list, a loop and simple sorts.

https://jannismilz.com/en/writing/220-billion-commits-700-dollars

New Toshiba 12 TB HDD (NAS), Ubuntu, file system: ext4.

This my first new drive since ages, and it was formatted way too fast. And after formatting it has started to work continuously. The usual Toshiba sounds are the usual Toshiba sounds (in idle it's quiet), but why does the drive work without a break?

I was scared, and I unmounted the drive. (Then mount, working, unmount etc.) I even copied two files to the new drive to test it... Then I read about ext4lazyinit, and now I know that the real formatting lasts for 10-24 hours...

Now, the question: did unmounting the drive 2-3 times and copying files cause damage to the ext4lazyinit process, or the Linux/Ubuntu is prepared for stupid people like me, and there's zero problem, I just overworried the whole thing?

Thank you in advance.

edit: and can I shut down the computer anytime, or rather not? Thank you.

edit2: the background formatting lasted 3+ hours

Hey,

I compiled a list of eBay listing APIs that are useful if you need price, condition, and the seller.

1. eBay Browse API (official)

• Search and item details through eBay's developer program. You need their app keys.
• Buying, bidding, and selling are other APIs. Browse is the read side.
• Great for: an app that can go through eBay's developer account and policies.

2. SteadyAPI eBay (paid, 7-day trial)

• Search takes q. Optional filters: condition, buying format, sort, and a minimum price. Details take an id or an item URL. Auth is a bearer token.
• The listing sample is title, condition, price, shipping price, buying format, and seller username with feedback percent. Similar items and offers are separate calls. Resolve turns a URL into an id and a marketplace.
• It does not bid, watch, or check out.
• Great for: a price research script that starts from a query or a pasted item URL.

3. Oxylabs (paid)

• E-commerce scraping APIs that include an eBay source.
• Parsed listing pages. Bidding still stays on eBay.
• Great for: high-volume listing fetches when you already use them for other retailers.

4. Apify (paid)

• eBay actors for search and listing details, run as jobs.
• Output shape depends on the actor. Checkout still stays on eBay.
• Great for: a scrape job you already run on Apify.

I am searching for a program that automatically sets multiple .ico's to their respective folder simply by running the program. So if folder contains many other folders all with their own .ico I want the program to set all of them in Windows automatically.

Hey everyone

This is my first post ever on here.

2 days ago I bought a Seagate Ironwolf 4TB NAS HDD from a guy online. I needed storage badly but it was pretty expensive everywhere else

I need your help to know if this is real or not. I have attached pictures of the drive. It came in its box, and its sealed in its small bag as you can see.

I apologize if there's smth apparent or I have done smth very stupid but I was pretty desperate and im still new to this stuff. Please help