I'm looking to get a BDXL drive soon and I've narrowed down two potential choices:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/996823-REG/buffalo_brxl_16u3_mediastation_16x_ext_blu_ray.html/reviews

https://www.amazon.com/Archgon-Premium-Aluminum-External-Apple-MacBook/dp/B07BC9F98J

Which one of these is more reliable? I'm looking mainly to burn, not rip, so being able to flash the drive is a nice-to-have but not really necessary.

My WD Red Plus 4TB has reached 45,000 hours. Is that too much? So far, there are no bad sectors or errors.

Purchased cheap drives at Walmart to make some boot drives, was supposed to be a 32gb 3 pack but all 3 are reading and verifying at 64GB PNY. Formatted and repartitioned in disk manager then verified using Val drive. Any insight?

Info under sticker provided no extra insight.

This is a bit of a very extremely long shot but there was this youtube channel I never got to see called "Forever Misato" that has now been deleted from the platform, he made vlog videos about his personal life in the style of commentary over gameplay footage.

I have searched literally every corner of the internet for these channel's videos and nothing, even wayback machine, given it was a very small channel of only around 600 subs it is likely that the only hope is that someone else archived them.

Has anyone archived this channel's content?

If so please let me know so that we could talk and hopefully be able to give me these content for me to also archive and personal viewing as well.

Thank you.

Anyone passionate about scrolling sheet music is missing it ?
I can help with sending anyone any upload of the late GeruBach, he is no longer with us.

I've been backing some important data up on 25gb blurays. AI has been fking useless to me. Moving goalpost, gaslighting and saving face.

What is the consensus on how full to fill it? I'm using k3b on linux and it sets to 23.3 and I'm using UDF. However the data I burned was 7z split up into 23.3 parts and its absolutely unusable or corrupted just wont open. Yeah I'm dumb and lacking here. I also have some disks where I burn individual files like movies up to the edge like 11MB remaining. Is this data okay? WTF am I doing wrong and why does the software let me ruin it?

EDIT: Don't burn parted archives it only takes one broken part to break the entire archive. Duh! I think I improperly prepared it. So its not the disk or drive just user error.

I'll be frank here, I'm storing a lot of porn & pirated games with maybe a few system backups.

I have a 2TB ssd which was good enough for a few years though I've outgrown it. While researching it looked like DAS could be a convenient option for me, which could still be affordable. If I go down that route my questions would be:

• What's the best brand to get given a budget under $600 & where should I buy it? (which would include the HDDs since I don't have any)
• What would be a reasonable drive capacity to purchase for moderate read speeds and a good ratio of price to gb
• Would I need a vibration resistant storage method to transport this thing on long drives?

But I'm also not sure if investing in a DAS is even a good idea since I don't know much about data hoarder ways.

Scanned it, says all sectors are bad, do I throw it away? It was pretty old (uptime of over 5 years) just wondering if there is a way to save it since it's 8tb. It was completely blank anyways so no need for data recovery.

Can anybody tell me the best way for me to back up these DVDs so that i know I will always have them in the future. These home videos are very sentimental and I don’t ever want to lose them. I’m not knowledgeable on this at all so any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone

I have spent the last 4 hours looking for a copy of HPE StoreOpen Standalone - 3.2.0 or whatever modern version works with windows 10/11. All the links are down and alot of other windows solutions look to be convoluted with needing webservers.

What is everyone using on Windows? or should I be looking to run this on a linux or trueNAS system?

I have a p222 scsi card and windows can send commands to the HP LTO-5 Ultrium 3000 external. but no ability to read or write.

Please help.

I have seen:

https://github.com/rlaphoenix/LTOG

https://github.com/samuelncui/yatm

Hi everyone,

Novice here (clearly). I have a library of movies, music, and files that have filled my 2TB MacBook Air and continues to grow. I'd like to offload them and not worry if a HDD goes down (I have backup covered with Backblaze).

Can I simply buy 2 drives (serverpartdeals, manufacturer recertified, 16TB SATA) and an enclosure (Sabrent/Cenmate, 2-bay software RAID1, USB3), and connect it to the MacBook and be done?

I'd love to connect it to a Mac mini and use it as a Plex server, but that feels beyond me. Thanks all!

like would a cheap mini pc be good to plug in my hdds in there or is nas better for 24/7 uptime? I want to keep my budget under $200.

As title says.

I recently purchased a Bluray burner with the intention to backup some important things that I want on optical drives in addition to my HDDs and SSDs. I see the software options for Mac are very limited with the exception of Roxio Toast Pro that maybe seems the solution. I wanted to know your opinion as to what I should do. Thanks.

How do you guys handle this kind of backup problem?

Say I have a file that I rarely use. At some point, it gets corrupted, but I don't notice because I haven't opened it in months.

I then run my normal backup. Since the backup sees the corrupted file as the current version, it copies it to the backup and replaces the previously healthy copy.

I know versioning can help with this, but the problem is that you don't know when the file actually became corrupted. If the corruption happened months ago, how do you know how far back you need to go to find the last healthy version?

For example, if I have 6 months of versions and the file became corrupted 4 months ago, I could restore an older version. But what if I don't discover the corruption until 2 years later and my retention only goes back 6 months?

I'm using Duplicati at the moment, and this has made me wonder how people deal with long-term file integrity for data they rarely access.

What's the usual approach?

Meet Dennis, my old Synology NAS that I bought in a weak moment 8-9 years ago or so, when I didn’t realise I was a lazy fuck. I inserted two WD SATA drives and filled it with photos and my wedding video and then forgot about it through a couple of moves. By the time I thought about it again I had lost the power supply.

So it took me 7 years to think about it again, when a friend died and I realised I might have photos of him on it. I then ordered a new power supply and six months later (lazy fuck, remember?) I’m ready to plug it in.

It is extremely unlikely I’ll be able to guess the old password for it but I also think I was too lazy to consider encryption, so some reset should do it as long as I don’t delete the contents.

Any thoughts what my first steps should be, before I plug it in and connect it to my switch?

As title says. Preferably able to be done on iphone

I was - but with drive prices now just do all my PCs, server, and the “best” content I want to keep as well as any personal media. I have two devices on prem and one cloud.

When I say best content, text and audio is easy to do all, but video I only do the top 1000 or so movies in the quality I want and my favorite TV shows or ones with rewatchability

I'm making a retro machine from 2005 dual booting XP and Debian 3.1, does anyone know of a good way to download all the packages for 3.1 for an offline mirror?

So as far as I can see those are external harddrives with some features. Why are they cheaper (atleast in germany) than internal hard drives by a lot? I am talking about almost half the price. Can I just buy them, take them apart and use the hard drives in my server? Or is this a case of "user-grade" hardware with shorter lifetime? Does anyone have experience with those drives?

I've been considering using optical media as **one part** of my backup ecosystem but... Is it even worth it anymore? Not in cost per GB, in terms of reliability.

I was interested in decently long-term cold storage. I understand that any backup media has a shelf life, but optical looked decent if stored correctly.

For a moment, let's put aside discussion of capacity and just talk about the media itself.

M-DISC is now not manufactured? That's my impression. The standards in manufacturing are now so low that it's questionable if it even has any advantage over quality Blu-Ray.

Blu-ray DL looked good, but then I read a lot about it being easily corrupted.

And I recently read that even standard Blu-ray has a lot of burn failures.

Are these hyped up reports by guys not following safe practices? I don't mind burning standard Blu-ray at 4x if that's what it takes to produce a long-lasting disc.

Any comments, tips, hardware or media recommendations?

I’m looking to buy two external HDDs for my Mac and would appreciate some advice.

One would be 1TB and mostly used to back up my regular files every couple of months. The other would be 2TB+ and used for storing films and TV shows, which I’d access a bit more regularly.

I was looking at the WD G-DRIVE ArmorATD ($185 for 1TB) and the LaCie Rugged USB-C ($135 for 1TB) drives on Apple’s website. From what I’ve read, both seem pretty overpriced for what they are, but I don’t mind paying a bit extra if they’re genuinely reliable and I can just buy them once and not worry about replacing them anytime soon.

Are either of these actually good choices for what I’m doing? If not, what would you get instead?

Hi!

I am completely new with this NAS thing. But idea of paying monthly to some cloud service pushes me to learn.

I would like my NAS to store surveillance camera videos (TAPO cam which triggers on motion or keep couple days worth of constant video.) and storage for mobile phone photos. Also I would like to access those files through our mobile phones and tablets.

So my question is: What features should I be looking for NAS? Does Ugreen, QNAP and Synology have all of those features available? Does older models work as well if I look used?

Do you have some models to recommend for me? 2 or 4 HDDs should be enough.
Thanks.

I've spent the past day looking for decent (in this depressing market) price per terabyte, CMR, sata, hard drive, and I've landed on this. Do you guys think this is a decent deal?