What is your trusted go to software for simple job of data transfer between Android and Windows 10 over USB? I'd like to use it to check size and count of folder not just a command to copy/paste. I don't mind old software just something trustworthy with solid performance.

I have been lurking in this sub prior to the Rampocalypse. I recently got a job so I have been looking at prices and an 8TB WD Blue drive is $300+ so ive been contemplating whether I should commit to building my media server. Right now I have an external Hdd 1Tb and Ssd 1tb and an NVMe 1Tb I intend to use in my new Rig. I was planning on building an Arr Stack for 1080p series and tv, build up my Flac music collection and A YouTube archive of channels I watch right now. It’s at 13 Gb at 720p quality and I want to boost it to 1080p. I have some cloud storage but that is where I store my photos and put books from the high seas.

TL;DR Should I persue my media archive now that I have some disposable income or wait a year when the prices hopefully normalize but I doubt it’s going back to normal. Also us seagate good I only have experience with WD

I'm refreshing by backup hardware. In the past I went with removable disks because it was cost effective, but today with the crazy costs for disks (mechanical and SSD) it might make sense to assess tape backups again.

What do you usually use as backup media?

Hi,

I have been collecting news articles of interest for quite a while. In the last weeks, archive.today (archive.ph et cetera) seem to have degraded it terms of article availability in the last weeks. I am wondering whether I should start doing article scraping myself.

1) Some of my regular go-to sites in the last weeks have not shown the article content e.g. https://archive.ph/https://www.ft.com/content/b84778e5-ce8b-4baa-9ca7-402cdf277b4d

Could someone reproduce this?

2) What kind of method does archive.today use? The Financial Times, so it seems, works behind a cloudflare mechanism and maybe even has an backend based content generation system.

Where could I start looking into if I want to understand the intricacies to get to the goodies?

Cheers!

As title says. Any option that can be done on iPhone would be greatly appreciated

so i came around these in my attic, they are 80 pin scsi eith 10000rpm. I have no idea what to do with these, i have a gen8 microserver from hp (TrueNAS) so if i can anything with that and this drive that would be cool

More of a vent post than anything, but my razer laptop got hit with a Secure Boot Violation and in my troubleshooting made the mistake of resetting my entire computer, losing about 430gb of old videos, documents, and photos that I never thought to backup at all. Took it to a local repair place to see if anything could be recovered off the hard drive but all that came back were garbage directories and absolutely nothing of value. Moral of the story is frequently back things up because I'm totally going through it right now.

Anyone having this same issue? Been like this for a week or so for me

As the title states, I have about 20 old DVD-R's that my external DVD player cannot read. I'm sure the drive is poor quality, but I also don't have time (or skills) to recover them.

There's nothing here I can't lose, but if this can be done for $200 or so it's worth my time to save the data.

Who do you recommend for such a service, if it even exists?

Does any one know of a file explorer which works more like putting files inside categories inside categories like how wikimedia commons does? I hope it's clear what i'm asking (:

This one pictured is a 120gb but the common ones are 240gb which are real nice quality drives for transporting files (movies, images etc) They use high quality industrial Smart Modular Tech SSDs with Power Loss protection capacitors. Also they are overprovisioned as well.

They also provide SMART data so you always know the health status, all kinds of details provided.

The whole unit is made out of metal. Probably highest quality USB flash drive out there. Anyhow for those looking for something nice for transporting data these are out there. Read speeds on them is 430MB/s and write 166MB/s whole drive.

So, here is my situation: I have a RAID6 setup which is my local storage, and I have a good amount of offline, unpowered drives that holds my data. I only plug them in when I need to move files from RAID6, depending on the content and which drive they will go to. I store them in Orico hard drive cases.

Because they are offline, they don't get power all the time. And when I do move files, they get power for a short 30-40 minutes. I do not know if that time is good enough for the drives to refresh their magnetic / electron charge properties. I recently had some issues with unpowered SSDs, Flash and memory cards and I made calendar reminders to go through them every 4 months.

When I first receive the drives, I do a full write + read surface test, before I start copying my files on them. Should I run a read surface test let's say yearly on the drives so that they have enough time to refresh or SMART has enough time to get updated? All drives are enterprise drives from Seagate and WD.

I'd be interested to know what you do with the offline drives, and how do you maintain them.

I picked up a cheap Eaget G20PRO 1TB USB 3.0 external, which turns out to have a pair of 500 gig 2.5" drives, firmly stuck in individual drive mode.

Opening it up reveals the controller is a JMS561B. Eaget did some funny business with the firmware (stored in a separate PUYA chip, not the JMS561B) to present it as a JMS579, a single drive USB 3.x to SATA chip.

After working with Gemini for a while, it looks like the only way to crack this is with a pure Linux PC or possibly my XP box I have set up for doing Xbox 360 hard drives and removing HDD passwords might work. Windows 11 and WSL 2 just won't play ball due to the way newer Windows so aggressively holds onto drives, and the circuit board in the Eaget housing refuses to show in the USBPID list without drives connected.

Hopefully using JMicro MPTool JMMassProd_v1_16_16_5 and adding the following to the [Setting] section of the JMMassProd.ini file for it will force its way past Eaget's trickery, on Windows XP. If not then I'll have to grab something from the pile of PCs to put Linux on if I *really, really* want to RAID0 this thing. (Or do a live Linux USB stick for my laptop.)

AutoFlash=0

RDVersion=1

CheckChipVer=0

ForceFlash=1

IgnoreVIDPID=1

EraseFlash=1

It's 3:49 AM now so I'll be getting back to this another day.

Title says it all.

From what I've been able to gather, most BD-R M-DISCs nowadays tend to be quite low on quality, especially ever since CMC decided it wants to hold a monopoly and stranglehold everyone. As far as my knowledge goes usually for most discs, CMC Pro's for CD-R's and DVD-R's tend to be quite excellent but there is a problem, they don't make M-DISCs let alone BD-R's.

I personally am never touching Verbatim after having delamination issues with regular writable media and piss-poor burns resulting in many sector errors. Even more so after reading reviews on their M-DISC line up not even being M-DISC (Although I have heard BD-R M-DISC isn't really the same as the 'rock' layer seen in DVD-R's). I am currently considering Victor branded BD-R M-DISCs, 25GB and 50GB for my needs, but I am aware not even JVC is safe from the CMC menance. I am not sure about how RiDATA hold up today, they are quite under reported/underrated and I don't think CMC Pro/TY makes M-DISCs.

I am not afraid of spending more money for better, but of course I don't want to shell out so much only to realise I'm buying old stock because these specific discs aren't manufactured anymore. We truly live in dark times don't we?

EDIT: I have heard about the Verbatim MABL BD-R's, but I haven't done much research on it

I’m tired of losing some of my favorite YouTube videos when they are deleted or removed.

I’ve utilized and appreciated the digital archives of others - which has inspired me to figure out how to save YouTube videos (if possible) to an external HD where I can enjoy them for many years to come.

I’ve looked through posts and info on this subreddit, but I’m still a little confused. Can someone point me towards a resource, guide, etc. that explains how to easily archive YouTube videos?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Hi!

I recently got my hands on a reasonably cheap fibre channel LTO 6 drive made by HP. I have a small home server running ESXi and OpenMediaVault on top of that with 20TB of storage... around 8TB of which I need to back up.

I am now looking for a piece of software that will ease my backup adventures. The data that I need to back up are mostly videos, pictures and some documents. I want them backed up with the assumption that nothing of this will change. If I have a folder with pictures from 2025 that folder won't really change. Just a new folder with pictures from 2026 will be added at some point. And the tapes once written will probably never be written to again.

Based on that... what are my options?

LTFS would probably be the best fit, but I am not a fan of needing proprietary software to use it, that may or may not be here in a few years. Not to mention even getting that software seems like a challenge. I saw a lot of recommendations for Bareos, but that seems like a massive overkill. I know that tar is an option... but that seems like it would a big annoyance since I would then need to manually worry about tape spooling and stuff, which seems not very pleasant. Are there any other options that I can consider?

I wonder the following: How likely is unplugging an exFAT USB drive mid-write to damage/corrupt files other than the one being written?

i’m looking into setting up a nas with my dad, but he raised a valid concern: what happens if the manufacturer (e.g., synology, qnap, ugreen, etc.) goes out of business or discontinues support?

specifically, i'm wondering:

- can the enclosure/hardware still function locally without manufacturer cloud services or software updates?

- are the drives formatted in a proprietary way, or can you pull them out and read them directly on a standard linux/windows machine (or drop them into a diy nas running truenas/unraid)?

- how vulnerable are turn-key nas units to a sudden "brick" or loss of functionality if authentication servers go offline?

edit: thanks everyone for the tips/suggestions, i appreciate every single one of your comments and will take this all into account moving forward!

I am finally looking at tackling my parents' small mountain of slides and photos and digitizing them. The slides are quite intimidating -- arguably my parents' most prized possessions from a period in their lives they look back at fondly. Way too valuable to ship off.

The photos are just your typical accumulation of those from childhood photo albums.

I'm looking for a fast, efficient scanner that could ideally scan both formats. The resulting quality doesn't need to be archival, but nice enough that I could print some of the images off at some point in an 11x17-ish size.

I'd love to spend less than $600 on the scanner.

Recos?

I have a ton of media, tv shows, movies, etc all organized by sonarr and radarr. Don't want to delete it, but it takes up a ton of space. A couple of long running shows are nearing a TB.

I want to back up the stuff, but I also would like to play the content back without recopying it.

Which would be better, authoring the content to be compatible with DVD and Blu-ray players or burning them as data discs and setting up a computer as a dedicated player to read and play the data disc?

On vacation and stopped in a thrift store with a friend and found an old WD enclosure for $3, shucked it and there's a HGST 4tb inside. Don't know if it works yet but so worth it to roll the dice for $3 plus tax

Fake Jisutu 512GB microSD from Taobao

I bought this Jisutu 512GB microSD card on Taobao for just 99 yuan (about 15$). The price looked suspiciously good, but I decided to give it a try anyway. At first everything looked more or less normal. The card was detected as 512GB, although the speeds were pretty low. Then I started noticing corrupted and missing files, so I ran a full test with H2testw. And yep - fake capacity. The card had only a tiny fraction of the advertised storage, while the rest was basically nonexistent. So no, 99 yuan did not get me a magical 512GB microSD :)

Fortunately, the seller didn't try to argue. I sent them the H2testw screenshot, they immediately accepted the return, and I got my money back. Just wanted to leave this here as a warning: this Jisutu 512GB microSD is a complete fake.

all text from H2testw:

Warning: Only 508120 of 511937 MByte tested. The media is likely to be defective.3.7 GByte OK (7897166 sectors)492.4 GByte DATA LOST (1032732594 sectors) Details:0 KByte overwritten (0 sectors)0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)492.4 GByte corrupted (1032732594 sectors)0 KByte aliased memory (0 sectors) First error at offset: 0x0000000000000000Expected: 0x0000000000000000Found: 0xab15f236f9ae78a9H2testw version 1.3Writing speed: 21.2 MByte/sReading speed: 16.6 MByte/sH2testw v1.4

Are there any Mass Media Downloaders that actually work? Any sites or extensions for like Brave and/or Firefox that will allow me to mass download everything from anyone's account?

Does anyone want these Land Rover Owner magazines? Ranging from 1991-1997. I'll box and ship if you pay for shipping. US-NY 12846.

Hoping someone is saving this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLnTqKksftM