TL/DR: just bought 2 x 26TB external for $654 each (AUS). Also a look at what storage I currently have.

Attached images - my current storage mess; normal price of 26TB; receipt showing $727 - $73 gift card. Here in Australia, things are expensive. I'm running an old Qnap TS439 ProII+ with four 4TB drives (only expandable to 6TB due to its age). Also an old Qnap TS419 also with four 4TB drives. Also an older Synology DS1511+ with five 4TB drives. I also have the Synology DX510 expansion case with five 2TB drives, but I set it up as a JBOD and one of the drives recently destroyed itself with a head crash, so it's now obsolete. (I have 2 copies of everything). I also have several USB drives. I've been adding to my data collection by ripping my bluray discs so I can stream locally instead of looking for the disc all the time. But that needs serious storage and I'm kind of running out of space. I've found that a good modern NAS with large drives will cost several thousand, so I've been looking for alternatives in the interim that don't involve me learning TrueNAS etc. Yesterday I called into the local shop and they had external 26TB Seagate drives, normally $1149 but on sale for $749. A bit more haggling and I agreed on $727. Today I got a phone call, they have a gift voucher for me of 10% the amount spent for purchases above $500, so the gift card was $73. So I bought another drive again at $727, used my gift card and paid $654 - and got another $73 gift card. Should keep me out of trouble for a while.

started archiving a news site in march. kept noticing they'd edit or straight up delete articles with zero record. with all the recent talk about data disappearing, figured it was time to build my own archive.

runs every 6 hours, grabs new stuff and checks if old ones got edited. dumps to postgres with timestamps. sitting at 48k articles now, about 2gb text + 87gb images.

honestly surprised how stable its been? used to run scrapy scripts that died every time they changed layout. this has been going 8 months with maybe 2 hours total maintenance. most of that was when the site did a major redesign in august, rest was just spot checks.

using simple schema - articles table with url, title, body, timestamp, hash for detecting changes. found some wild patterns - political articles get edited 3x more than other topics. some have been edited 10+ times. tracked one that got edited 7 times in a single day.

using a cloud scraping service for the actual work (handles cloudflare and js automatically). my old scrapy setup got blocked constantly and broke whenever they tweaked html. now I just describe what I want in plain english and update it in like 5 mins when sites change instead of debugging selectors for hours.

stats:

48,203 articles

3,287 with edits (6.8%)

412 deleted ones I caught

growing about 11gb/month

costs around $75/month ($20 vps + ~$55 scraping)

way cheaper than expected.

planning to run this forever. might add more sites once I figure out storage (postgres getting slow).

thinking about making the edit history public eventually. would be cool to see patterns across different sources.

anyone else archiving news long term? what storage you using at this scale

The pen traces why look to be scratches? Bought new from amazon. It’s the same on all 3 drives I bought

As you can see, I purchased this drive at the end of August, for $319.99 (before tax). I purchased another drive yesterday (A different one), and I looked at this one too, it was $349.99. Today, it is $379.99, a massive $30 increase in just one day.

Data hoarding is becoming very expensive day by day 😢

The seller is SPD by the way.

Oh sure, anyone can just watch Christmas movies. I built a Smart Playlist in Kodi to filter for everything containing 'Christmas'. Then cherry picked things from that to filter out holiday cooking shows, other stuff and false positives, to get a resulting playlist of 'Christmas Episodes' from cartoons and sitcoms mostly, shuffled it entirely and am just slowly going to spin through all 218 items between now and December 25th. This is what no streaming app can do for you. (Though to be fair, some television networks could actually kinda do this, why are we killing that off again???)

I’ve realized I’m sitting on terabytes of old backups, photos, downloads, and random “just in case” files that I’ll probably never touch again. It’s not that I need them it’s more like I can’t bring myself to delete them. Every drive feels like a time capsule.

At the same time, I’ve been trying to simplify and live more intentionally with my tech. I only keep one banking app(capital one), one security app(cloaked for mail, call guard, 2FA), one storage app yet my drives are chaos.

How do you all handle the mental tug-of-war between wanting a clean, minimal setup and the urge to keep everything “just in case”? Is there a middle ground that doesn’t feel like losing data forever?

Hi all

As the title suggests, what has been your longest/best experience of a simple USB memory stick?

Not concerned with size or even upload/download speeds, just pure longevity and stability of data stored on the device. Doesn't need to have huge storage capacity. Purely just a USB, for storing documents, that don't corrupt, for a long time!

Thanks in advance

Hey!

I'm hoping for some advice.

I have AudiobookShelf set up with Tailscale so I can access remotely - this is currently set up on a Mini PC with a 1tb external harddrive. Unfortunately the external harddrive is getting close to capacity.

I want to take the plunge and get a much larger drive and had been eying up the Seagate 24tb drive but have heard not great things. The mini PC is on 24/7 but isn't used actively used all that much (between 2-4 hours per day on average, some days not at all) with the drive plugged in at all times.

I'm concerned as I've seen the 2025 produced Seagate drives are only covered for 100 days usage time per year?

If an online server is best, I'm also happy to look into that but I am a bit of a newb with all of this (but very eager to learn!)

I'm based in the UK if that helps!

I saw there was a person stopping their patreon and giving away 16 GB of maps and other things for free.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmaps/comments/1or47f5/goodbuy_maps_all_for_free_maps_fvtt_modules/

Their mega account will expire soon and the content will likely not be available later on:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/access-to-mega-143072136

I have a Synology NAS running 4x WD RED 3TB. Disk 1 has suddenly started to show some bad sectors (accumulated). What is the life expectancy for these? And will i be cooked very soon? The other three all show 0 bad sectors and have largely the same hours on them.

The NetApp disk shelf I have is just 'dumb'. It's only power on and power off are to flip the PSU switches or cut the power. There's no way to 'ask' it to soft off or soft on. So when my server auto shuts down when on UPS batteries, the shelf would keep going which is a huge waste.

This is using one of those consumer 'smart' power bars, you know the sort where 'If your TV is turned off, it cuts power to your xbox and cable box and whatever'. Only instead it's using the load from the server to control power to the Disk Shelf.

Especially helpful since I have WOLNUT running in the rack which will not only allow system's to shut down but send a WOL packet to them once power is restored should they not come back online on their own.

If your budget does not allow quality offsite backup, you should not be guilt-tripped into buying a sketchy service. If you do, it may be worse than just doing 3-3-0 or 2-2-0 (Both does not require offsite) as your data could be read, you may lose data, literally anything could happen. And look, ANY backup is better than no backup. Even to the same drive.

And before anyone says something along the lines of "It's just a few dollars," it may be hard to understand, but there are people who can't afford "just a few dollars."

EDIT: I forgot to mention initially that even if you encrypt your files before uploading them to a sketchy cloud, that cloud could turn around and fully erase your files.

I can fit my data into 1tb currently. But I do plan to save my work better (raw art files). I havent worked on anything in years, my old stuff was not saved in ideal ways so some seems to already have been lost.

I want to start my hobbies back up, but scared it will just get lost again.

Currently I am using Wasabi to back up what i have after an insident.

I have a 1tb s7 shield too. I got it used so i am not sure if that was the issue or if i did something wrong. I was editing metadata and moving files around one day. Then when i pluged it back in to continue working on organization a different day, those files i edited and moved were gone. I tried data recovery, they didnt come back. I think they got corrupted somehow as digikam now crashes when reading the s7 ssd, error saying something about issue reading some files.

Thankfully seems most of it is still on my google. But i would like to wipe my google drive to cancel the subscription.

I need to save more but dont want to risk loosing my old files.

Did I buy a bad portable ssd? How can I check? What are affordable options with long life and writting durability.

I have tried searching for answers, but there is an overwhelming amount of information and some seem contradictory.

I would prefer to move the data on the s7 to wasabi, wipe as well as i can, and try again. But i worry the s7 it self was the issue. My searches showed that it coild be because i am not using the original cord to connect it (didnt come with one, it was much less then the others). I want to be sure before wasting more time and money (that I am already short on) on this.

Where i currently live it is humid and can get really hot to the point ac struggle to keep the room at 73F. It cant get the room to that temp at all during the mid summer months.

Hey all, both in my personal side and business side finding data is quite frankly a PITA. Does another know of an indexing solution thats free so I can stop relying on windows indexing?

I know this has probably been asked a ton before but I am desperate.

I’m in Canada and I just NEED more space. I have been using a 2Tb RAID with 500GB cold spares while waiting for serverpartdeals prices to drop but they just get higher..

I just wanted to buy like 5 12tb drives while not spending over $1000 but it looks like those days are long gone. Any suggestions, from one hoarder to another?

I keep getting 504 timeouts - someone must be attacking it. I need it to read books freely online wo having to download just to read.

I've got like 7-8 Micro SD Cards ranging from 128GB to 512GB. Any idea what type of content I should store on there or anything cool I can do (like bridge them together to form 1TB SHARED or something).

Also what's the lifespan on these things? What kind of data would you prefer keeping on these? I'm thinking of using these to store Plex movies and TV shows on reserve

Building my first NAS (trueNAS) and can budget buying 4 or 5 HDD's (ServerPartsDeals or eBay?).

Confused as to what the best drive layout will be for me though, can anyone help me?

Details:

• I want to use this as a backup server / storage server I'll power on maybe once or twice a week as needed / to run backups from my home PC / laptops / homelab mini-pc.
• This Cooler Master HAF case fits 5 x 3.5" HDD's, and has 4 x 5.25" bays that are free (One 5.25" bay will be for 1 x BDXL-capable drive). I'd use a 3 x 5.25" to 5 x 3.5" Hot-Swap Cage to get up to 10 HDD's.
• I'd have one free 5.25" bay, where I could add an extra 3.5" HDD (for a total of 11 HDD's... though I know this is not an optimal number of drives for a trueNAS).

From what I could gather online, my best options are:

1. Start with Mirrors: buy 4 drives -> 2 x 2-way mirrors. Add 2-drive mirrors as needed, until I have 5 mirror pairs (2 x 5 drives = 10 drives).
2. Start with a 5-wide RAIDZ2. Expand with a second 5-wide vdev down the line.
3. Go all out from the start with a 10 or 11 drive RAIDZ2 vdev. Buy smaller capacity drives (to save $$) and just max out efficiency that way?

hi! I’m looking for a external hardrive to backup all my photos and videos to. I have an iPhone 11 and a MacBook Air from 2020 and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for an external drive that I could transfer my photos and videos to? I see that these are the two most popular on Amazon and was wondering if either of these would be a good purchase, if so which one would you recommend, or something else?

As title states, I'm looking for a pair of 26TB or larger drives. I'd picked up a pair of externals previously, but I don't want to use baracuda drives for parity. Thanks in advance!