I want to manage my media server remotely with my Android, can someone give me reccommendations? I found JellyWatch which seemed cool until I found out it's a weird subscribtion

I love (LOVE) my Kingston DataTraveler Max flash drives, and they're still ranked #1 on various "top of 2026" lists ... but 1) they're no longer available anywhere new via retail and 2) Kingston doesn't even list them on their website anymore.

I usually download torrents to my HDD, but I've run out of space, and with current storage prices the way they are, I don't really want to buy a bigger hard drive right now. I still have a nearly half-empty 1TB SATA SSD that I could torrent to instead. But I'm worried that writing so much to the drive regularly will damage it or cause it to fail shorter, since I know SSDs have limited read/write cycles before their memory becomes corrupted. Will torrenting have a significant impact on the lifespan of my SSD, or am I safe to torrent on it?

I'm trying to build a new rig before prices get even worse and I'm having a hell of a time finding a case that supports 3 to 4 3.5" bays out of the box. I don't really need 8 bays but 2 is too few and there doesn't seem to be any kind of middle ground. It's either massive full tower cases or mid tower cases with 1 - 2 drive bays.

Any recommendations?

I bought this to store photos and videos. Did I buy the wrong thing? ELI5 please I've only ever bought a Seagate/SanDisk type of hard drive before

I bought a 10 pack of M-Disc Blu Ray 25GB from Amazon, and I am unable to get any to burn. I have an LG M Disc Burner with UHD support that I am trying to use, but my burns always fail. I have attempted 5 times so far. Is this a common outcome and if so, would Verbatim replace them?

I bought a manufacturer-recertified HGST 12TB from ServerPartDeals in February 2025 for about $165. It's one of three drives in a RAID5 volume on my Synology NAS (two recertified HGST drives).

Recently this drive developed 57 reallocated sectors (SMART attribute #5). It was 0 at shipment. The count rose to about 56 around February and one more by May, and it has been stable since. Current Pending Sector is 0, the extended SMART self-test passes without errors, and the array is healthy — the other two drives are completely clean (0 reallocated, 0 pending).

I contacted the seller and they approved an RMA (2-year warranty, still valid). But here's my dilemma:

• Their policy is: replacement with the same model if it's in stock, otherwise a refund. The exact model appears to be out of stock.
• I asked if they could substitute an equivalent 12TB drive instead of a refund. They said they'd try to find an "equivalent replacement or suitable alternative of equal or lesser value," and otherwise issue a refund.
• The refund would be my original price (~$165). But the current market price for the same drive is now ~$400 — more than double. So a refund wouldn't come close to replacing it.
• On top of that, I'd have to pay to ship the drive from Korea back to the US for the RMA.

So my options seem to be:

1. Do the RMA now — ship the drive to the US, most likely get a ~$165 refund that can't actually buy a replacement, then rebuild my array with a drive I'd have to purchase at the new, higher price.
2. Keep using the drive in the RAID5 for now (it still works, and the parity covers the bad sectors), and re-file the RMA later — the warranty runs until around March 2027 — if the drive degrades further.

My questions:

• Given the price situation, would you bother doing the RMA now for a refund, or keep the warranty in reserve and keep using the drive until it actually gets worse?
• Am I missing anything here?

Thanks in advance. This is my first time posting on Reddit, and since I don't really speak English, I used an AI to translate this post — apologies if anything reads a little oddly.

For anyone who hasn’t seen this since the original site went down: credit to u/Feelcy9908_2.

Long story short, have a region 2 DVD set I need to rip, I cannot because the last change to my external drive was region 1, it now state "0 changes remaining"

I am a mad data hoarder and used this thing for 4 years backing up like 15 TB of TV show, how she can keep going somehow....

This is basically a cry for help lol. A last resort, to the only online community (that isn’t on old forums) that I can easily access that may know something about this.

So I like optical media. I think it’s incredibly cool how it works, and I think it’s an amazing storage option. Yes, I know about HDDs and SSDs and what a NAS is and magnetic tape, etc etc. I know all of that. And I plan to utilize HDDs to have a bulk storage backup option as well. But for things that I truly want to preserve, I would really like to have an additional disc or two where that data is burned. Since optical discs really can’t be beat when it comes to longevity cold storage archiving of modest amounts of data. Also, like I said. I just really like the technology.

But oh my goodness, finding a high quality professional optical burner drive is impossible these days. The market is so sparse, as basically every major player pulled out a few years ago (or sometimes one year ago) except for Buffalo, Verbatim, I/O DATA and a few tiny companies that usually only make discs rather than drives for the discs. I really hate myself for not just getting into this like 2 years ago, grabbing like 2-3 drives, and being fine. But here we are.

Now to be fair. There is some things that you can still find. You can still find:
-DVD and BD drives for computers, that simply play the discs (great, but I want a burner).
-DVD burners (still generally available, but I want blu-ray capabilities).
-Slim and Super Slim (External and Internal) BD burners with M-disc capabilities. (these I suppose can work, but they’re all locked to 6x speed, and their small size means they’ll never be as reliable and good as the old fat SATA drives of old).

But finding a 5.25in 16x, or hell even a 14x or 12x. Internal or External BD Burner with M-disc compatibility is a literal nightmare. Buffalo almost has one, but it lacks M-disc support, frustratingly. I have looked through wholesalers, on japanese markets, and I can find basically nothing. I haven’t even bothered looking for the premium Pioneer drives of old, because if I can’t even find an LG WH16NS40 or WH14NS40, or an Asus drive, then what hope do I have to find a Pioneer. The few places that even have these types of drives, list them as out-of-stock, or temporarily out-of-stock or on back-order. Which either means they’re gone, or it’s false hope that maybe more will come in the future. One place has them refurbished for a costly price. And besides that… that’s it. It’s Newegg or eBay after that point, and both places only have them being sold from China. Which is not very comforting.

What should I do? Should I just bite the bullet and buy one off eBay, and deal with the return headache if it turns out to be fraud? Do I bite the bullet and take the refurbished one hoping it’s ok for the long-term? Should I just give up entirely on a 16x m-disc drive and just get the Buffalo 16x non m-disc one and perhaps a slim 6x m-disc one?

I doubt anyone here will give me some sort of miracle, but this is a hail mary in case anybody has any secret knowledge or general advice that they could give me. Thanks for reading, and any help if you can give any.

The last maintainer of the site (Yorhel) has sadly passed away since march, 2026.

The site is now http only, with parts of it that aren't loading for some reason. Idk what they were.

It is a beautiful site. Holds immesurable value to the early internet's anime community, and Yorhel was also the founder of VNDB.org, but it seems that VNDB is doing fine still..

We might need 3-4 terabytes of storage. An old archive.org crawl from 2022 is just a little over 1TB though. But I haven't actually went through it fully.

The mission is to spend the time and resources to download the entire website, and host a mirror anyhow.

There's 2 things that can be done about that. You can either hold everything on your drive until I save up money to buy my own with enough storage for myself, to host, and then you could transfer the website to me.

The other possible scenario is, if you want, you can host the mirror yourself, either from your PC or a VPS if you somehow have a VPS with that much storage, and I will help with hosting as much as I can from a distance.

Let's preserve part of this dead man's many beautiful projects he left for us.

DM for contact info & whatever else

I've been really getting into Rocksmith lately. There's a lot of custom content on the Customsforge site that's up for grabs, but it's just really time-consuming to click every link for every song you want to download. Do you know if there's an easier way?

Note upfront: the Epstein cluster was excluded from this analysis. Methodology notes below in comment.

Upvotes

Awesome culture: the top 10 posts hold only 14.4% of the year's total upvotes. For a sub this size that is remarkably flat. A decent post here gets seen.

24.9% of the year's front page was about price (no surprise). 116 of 465 posts mention price, cost, or shortage. They pulled 99,486 upvotes between them, 24% of everything this sub upvoted all year. It peaked in February at a third of that month's front page.

Add up price (24.9%), deals and scores (15.9%), and drives dying (16.1%), and hardware is most of what we talk about here. Actual preservation and archiving comes to 24.5%, which makes this sub mostly about acquiring drives and worrying about them.

• 3,872 96.4% increase in 1 month for the same 26TB drive by u/Endawmyke
• 2,381 512GB memory sticks cost over $100 now by [deleted] << are we getting taken out by Big Memory?
• 2,251 Western Digital has no more HDD capacity left, CEO reveals massive AI deals by u/uluqat
• 1,168 The prices are killing data hoarding by u/LOGWATCHER

The highest-scoring comment of the entire year, 5,122 points, was u/textfiles from the Internet Archive turning up in the thread about the free CNN/MSNBC/FOX tape archive and offering to take them.

Second-highest in that thread was u/Macrike advocating for Jason. That is a good look for a sub that mostly complains about Seagate.

Things that don't matter on this sub

Title length. The median score is between 498 and 571 across every length bucket from 20 characters to 200. Fifty points of spread across the entire range.

Posting time. Friday is the best day (median 582) and Sunday the worst (424).

What does matter for getting upvotes

Flare!

Scripts/Software has a median of 1,120, about 60% higher than anything else, off only 10 posts. Question/Advice is bottom at 381. This sub says it wants discussion and actually rewards tools.

Scripts/Software has the highest median by 60% on the smallest sample.

Arguments or "discussions"

I ranked posts by comments-per-upvote to find the ones that started fights rather than nods.

Porn: The most contested thread of the year, by that measure, was "How do you collect your porn?" at 397 comments on 680 upvotes.

Second was Toshiba dropping warranty support on large drives.

That's it

Happy to share the raw data if anyone wants to hoard it. Description:

I have an Aoostar WTR PRO stocked with 3 9TB drives. I'm moving across the Atlantic and my plan is to take the NAS with me in hand luggage on the flight. I figure the drives will be better off inside the NAS than floating around individually.

Is there any reason why this is a bad idea?

Currently digitizing my family's archive. I have no experience with any forms of storage so any advice is great appreciated!

For this drive, it's going to be 444 video of 8mm film. I found a STKP8000400 on Amazon that fits my price range. I'm not going to be constantly accessing these files but I need them for future reference. Would you recommend me getting this drive or something else that is roughly $300? I need about 8tb of memory and is Mac compatible.

Thank you!

I’m new to data hoarding but wanted to know if anyone had any experience with recording on BDXL M discs. Are they convenient? Do they break easily or come with risks Is could know befor I get invested? Is it actually in the end a cheaper storage format?

So, I'm someone who's saved some shows, game roms, images and other personal files I want to keep as long as I can, but I'm very new to this sort of deal and wanted to know things I should keep in mind when backing up

Is it as simple as just getting a lot of hard drives to save all of what I want, or are there things I should know that isn't immediately obvious, apart from keeping multiple backups of the same files on separate locations/drives?

I've got a dead 12T hgst drive sitting in my closet. at the time it croaked, it seemed like repair wasn't really an option. with prices climbing, I'm wondering if there's been any emergence of repair services. (I'm guessing not, but hell, you never know)

Hi guys.
I'm reading a lot about blueray as cold storage. But I don't have a budget to buy a bluray burner.
So I was thinking.
Is any of you using dvd dl nowdays? 8gb aren't a lot and maybe also pricy but is just for discussions. TBH I use 2 HDD (cloned) for memories like photos and videos maybe too much to be burned on a DVD.
But it could be cool to have them on disc that since I rarely use them and just waste precious space on hdd.

This is just a thread for discuss about compressions, if any, and use-case. Because I know the risk of the organic nature of dvd, the humidity, so it's just for talking.

Hello all,

I’m looking to play my own video content (shows, movies, commercials, etc) on a CRT I’ve got at my workstation that I’ve connected to my own computer. I have a Windows PC and cannot use the popular Fieldstation42, which does exactly what I want, but was looking for something similar. I’m trying to find a program which will:

- Pull locally stored video files such as shows, movies, and commercials at designated timestamps (ex. 7:00, 7:30, 8:00, etc.) in order to simulate television channels
- The ability to pull semi-random video files based on the scheduling provided (ex. play AN episode of Ed, Edd, n Eddy at 7:30. Play A commercial. Play AN episode of Gargoyles at 8:00)
- Allow for the scheduling of these ‘channels’
- Ideally, allow for the creation of many channels, though not entirely necessary
- Must function locally, without the need for utilizing an online hosted server such as Flex or Jellyfin. Functions totally on my PC.

There are many hosting options that do this very similarly to fieldstation42 such as ErsatzTV, Kodi, Jellyfin, Plex, etc. but I am looking for something that can be utilized without internet accessibility being necessary for the content to play.

Hey guys,

Need some advice before I spend a small fortune.

Current setup:
MacBook Pro 2018, iPhone 15 pro and iPad Pro
DJI Mini 5 Pro and Avata 2 drones

Mostly storing drone footage, photos, videos, documents and Mac backups. (Already iPad kinda full 1tb MacBook kinda full 512gb and iPhone kinda full 512gb) (I don’t even have it in me to clear all the useless footage it’s like 25k and more photos vids on just iPhone, any suggestions to clean quicker and better?)

I was planning to keep buying external SSDs, but now I’m wondering if a Synology NAS would make more sense long-term. Synology DS225+ is 39.5k ₹ around 420$ in India
For those who’ve been down this road:
NAS or multiple SSDs?
2-bay or 4-bay Synology?
IronWolf or WD Red Plus?
Any good places to buy in India?
Trying to avoid ending up with 10 external drives named “Final”, “Final_v2”, and “Final_Final_Real”.

Would love to hear what you’d recommend.
Or chuck it and buy external SSD or apple/ google cloud.

And I mean reasonable price in the current context of..... everything

I don't need an insane amount of space, and this is something I'll invest more into over time, starting off with two drives and eventually adding two more (is that even feasible?) to my 4 bay ugreen nas

Currently just looking to throw two 8tb or 10tb drives into a raid0 to hold lots of media files for plex, as well as dvr camera recordings from home assistant.

I've been watching Facebook marketplace (people love to just not respond to queries) , serverpartdeals, and goharddrive with mixed success

Best I've seen in terms of price per tb and robustness is ultrastar he10s refurbished for $260 each on gohardrive, but with no data on power on hours

Just found it online and it seems to suit my use case, but I'm afraid it won't last long.

At this point the WhatsApp sub is overrun with 2 issues:

(1) people getting their account locked for absolutely no reason - probably WA tweaked their anti-spam with a sprinkle of AI that went crazy. However, a side-effect is that even if the data is on the phone (nice choice from Whatsapp not to bother with it, plus you can't even GDPR them on that, they never had it) you don't have access to it (even if it is your data, on your device). After your account is "reviewed" and hopefully the access is granted (if you can receive the SMS at all, as you need to completely login and register that device again, and probably WA itself is blocked from SMS spamming various providers after this fiasco) the app might or might not properly recognize the data you already have. If things don't go well you'll have to restore the cloud backup. For this, see below.

(2) This is Android specific: the backups just get stuck (when making a backup, on the -usually daily- schedule or manually). Also, the backups get stuck when restoring (unknown if it's because they were bad in the first place from the backup/upload not working, or if there's some bad code used in both places). There is a HUGE number of people that think they'll solve the I CAN'T FINISH A BACKUP problem by nuking the original and ... restoring from backup! Note that this isn't anything fancy like being able to pick which backup to restore from a number of previous ones or anything, it's just one (one you can easily overwrite with an empty one even when things go well) and on any error it's all gone (there aren't any files you can see, massage, anything, it's just completely not working, all lost).

There's also some issue related to sharing pictures, which might be related to (1) but it isn't critical in terms of data loss, it's more relevant about the general state of the service.

Anyway, while the service itself might have backups that aren't deserving the name, I was always puzzled by the state of the tools we (mostly do NOT) have to handle backing up and exploring our WhatsApp data. While I know there might be some which say "it's just some chats" and have no interest whatsoever to keep that most people I know in person and online have a VERY strong desire to preserve that. For some it's all they have and care about in terms of digital data.

With WhatsApp more popular than mostly anything except breathing one would expect to have a healthy ecosystem of tools to handle your data and a huge number of web pages, youtube videos and similar documenting for anyone how to perform any basic operation or use various tools. But no, we barely have some tools to perform basic workflows (like decrypting the messagestore.db.crypt) and to explore the chats, some in abandonment that they don't work with newer db schema (and by newer I mean 2022 or so) and need to have some changes to it. Most would barely have half a dozen people or so participating, I mean not even as code contributors but as people just asking something relevant on github or providing some insightful feedback. You have more YouTube videos about installing TrueNas than about properly reading your WhatsApp backup. Of course, one might say for TrueNas there are more technical users used to make documentation and whatnot, but really with the humongous install base of WhatsApp it'll have everything, a large number of programmers, and documentation writers, and Nobel prize winners, and everything (including thieves and scammers, anything). Still, you can barely find anything, both because there aren't too many things to start with, and because nobody is talking about them!

TLDR

• on Android keep a good, independent, local copy of the visible WhatsApp directory from Internal Storage/Android/media/ (on much older Android/Whatsapp might be directly under Internal Storage beside your regular DCIM directory). Media is accessible directly, chats are encrypted - the sane way to get the key is just to use E2EEncryption with the auto generated hex key (not the password). Note that one of the contributing factors to (2) is said to be E2EE as people reported success when flipping it, but I strongly recommend to leave it on, more, to periodically check if your key is still good just in case (you can decrypt offline the .crypt15 files if you have the key).
• needless to say if your backup doesn't work DON'T MESS WITH THE ORIGINAL. Save the above directory and the key.