It's A Digital Disease!

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/FallenCrab on 2025-07-23 07:37:28.

Hi, I'm pretty new to data hoarding but today I'm here because of my dad who has tons of photos and videos scattered all over the place... old ext. harddrive, new ext. harddrive and handful of flashdrives and SD cards, etc. and none of those things are backed up in any way.

My original idea was simply buying him extra ext. harddrives, literally taping two together and having him dump the photos/videos to both for redundancy... guess what... he's not doing it because "it wastes space = money" and "he didn't lose any photos/videos yet so it's unlikely it will happen in the future"... flawless logic.

So my current idea, that I need help with, is simply a (small) case with a bunch of HDDs inside all connected together in RAID with only one port out and showing as one storage unit in the PC for simplicity. It would be offline and turned off most of the time except roughly monthly photo/video dump and some photo title/description property editing. Speed is not a priority and there's no need for internet connection, Bluetooth, etc. The problem is that I have no idea how to actually put it together... whether I need some server level bullshit, old PC parts or just some small control board powered through USB with a bunch of ports.

Bear in mind, my dad is clueless when it comes to PC and all related tech and he's also cheap af so cloud and NAS are not an option... hell, if the solution is any more complicated than plugging the cable in, dragging a folder from one window to the other, leaving his laptop to go do something else and then unplugging it when it's done, he's simply not gonna do that.

Thanks for any help or advice.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/v1bran7 on 2025-07-23 05:36:30.

I currently have 4c 6tb WD nas hdd on DS1621+

In the market to upgrade and researching new drives.

Stumbled upon server part deals for the drives.

Are these good NAS drives? Believe they are also compatible with DS1621+?

https://ebay.us/m/eyXRDd

Edit: Typo and added nas model

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Clive1792 on 2025-07-23 05:21:00.

I'm looking to make a backup of stuff that isn't hugely important but I'd still like to back it up all the same. As such I don't want to pay top dollar but I do want it doing. I hopped on to Western Digital Refurb/Recirt.....

My Passport

WD Elements SE

WD Elements Portable

I actually have a portable drive and am happy enough with it but when looking for a 4TB drive, the others popped up as options too so I thought I'd come here & ask what the difference is before buying.

Yep, I know we're talking only £2.00 difference so I'm guessing it doesn't matter massively, but that doesn't stop me from wondering what the difference is between the three.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/lowdirt on 2025-07-23 03:07:07.

I have two identical 2TB external storage drives. I intend for their contents to be identical: one drive is to back up the other. Is there an app that could automate the change in one drive to trigger the copying of data to the other?

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/rastyus on 2025-07-23 02:46:46.

My goal is to have one big logical drive jbod style for ease of use, with the ability to add and remove drives as my needs require. I have redundancy via other means.

As far as I understand a simple storage spaces pool, the data on the drive can only be read in that pool. Ie it's raid like, if your pool fails you lose your data, can't easily move an individual drive and data together to a new machine etc.

This making me lean towards drivepool as you can keep the original drive partitions intact, can pull a drive out plug it into another computer and read that data, if a drive fails you only lose what's on that drive.

I just want to confirm that I am not doing something wrong/missing a setup option with storage spaces before I buy a drivepool license.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/tinpanalleypics on 2025-07-23 01:31:52.

I don't want software that creates an image, I want these backups of files and media to do an exact copy of a main drive and be accessible when necessary. I have 3 backups now that I made with FreeFileSync. Is there any thing better now?

I need it to take basically D:\FOLDER\Content and compare with the one in my backup and only copy over what's different. I want to be able to take a backed up HDD later, scan it, and have software tell me "ok, these things have been changed/added/deleted from your parent drive since the last backup, so we'll get your backup updated to match the changes you've made on your main drive"? 

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/anvil-14 on 2025-07-23 00:48:13.

i’m looking to add a couple more 16 TB drives to my zFS pool that i use for backup. The NAS versions are $198 and carry a 5 year warranty. Does anyone have any experience with this brand?

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/unmesh59 on 2025-07-23 00:19:35.

I have one of them running ProxMox in a mini server and was going to buy another for my second mini server when I saw reports that it might have a firmware bug that causes it to slow down.

Any recommendations for alternatives for ProxMox? The NVMe slots are Gen 4

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/PenileContortionist on 2025-07-22 23:25:55.

Hey folks, threw this together last night since seeing the post about ultimate-guitar.com getting rid of the download button and deciding to charge users for the content created by other users. I've already done the scraping and included the output in the tabs.zip file in the repo, so with that extracted you could begin downloading right away.

Supports all tab types (beyond """OFFICIAL"""), they're stored as text unless they're Pro tabs, in which case it'll get the original binary file. For non-pro tabs, the metadata can optionally be written to the tab file, but each artist has a json file that contains the metadata for each processed tab so it's not lost if not. Later this week (once I've hopefully downloaded all the tabs) I'd like to have a read-only (for now) front end up for them.

It's not the prettiest, and fairly slow since it depends on Selenium and is not parallelized to avoid being rate limited (or blocked altogether), but it works quite well. You can run it on your local machine with a python venv (or raw with your system environment, live your life however you like), or in a Docker container - probably should build the container yourself from the repo so the bind mounts function with your UID, but there's an image pushed up to Docker Hub that expects UID 1000.

The script acts as a mobile client, as the mobile site is quite different (and still has the download button for Guitar Pro tabs). There was no getting around needing to scrape with a real JS-capable browser client though, due to the random IDs and band names being involved. The full list of artists is easily traversed though, and from there it's just some HTML parsing to Valhalla.

I recommend ~~running the scrape-only mode first~~ using the metadata in tabs.zip and using the download-only mode with the generated json output files, but it doesn't really matter. There's quasi-resumption capability given by the summary and individual band metadata files being written on exit, and the --skip-existing-bands + --starting/end-letter flags.

Feel free to ask questions, should be able to help out. Tested in Ubuntu 24.04, Windows 11, and of course the Docker container.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Broad_Sheepherder593 on 2025-07-22 22:53:57.

So our government has a customs rule that regulates all manufacturing of optical media - hard disks, cds, vinyl, etc. in which we have to pay a usd 20 fee to get a permit to ship in and out - for my case processing RMAs.

Fine, usd 20 not much but the process of applying and all.

Their reason is to protect intellectual property! Oh, SSDs not included

Any experience in other countries?

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/bsgapollo on 2025-07-22 22:25:31.

I'll start off by saying all of my nvme slots are occupied before I get recommendations for that, but I'd still like to get some extra storage, also at a cheaper price, I've done a fair amount of research myself, but I would really like to get a second opinion on what would be the best option for my specific usage case.

The models in question and that seem to make the most sense in my region (price wise) are the: Seagate HDD 3.5" 24TB ST24000DM001 Barracuda and the Toshiba MG10 20TB 3.5" SATA III MG10ACA20TE

• The 24 tb Seagate costs €289 (price per terabyte is €12.04)
• The 20 tb Toshiba costs €326 (price per tarabyte is €16.30)

Obviously the 24 tb looks way more appealing in terms of price and what you are getting for it, but the 24tb model has 2 years of warranty while the Toshiba one has 5 years of warranty.

• 24 tb seagate specs:
  • Maxmium data transfer speed: 190 mb/s
  • Cache buffer: 512mb
  • Rated workload: 120 TB/year
  • Load/unload cycles: 600,000
  • Noise: (unable to find in the manual)
  • Power on hours (per year) for annualized failure rate: 2400 hours
• 20 tb Toshiba specs:
  • Maxmium data transfer speed: 268 mb/s
  • Cache buffer: 512mb
  • Rated workload: 550 TB/year
  • Load/unload cycles: 600,000
  • Noise: Idle: 20 dB, Seek, 32 dB
  • Power on hours (per year) for annualized failure rate: 8760 hours

My specific use case for the hard drives would be storing movies & other forms of entertainment media, I would regularly access the drive probably up to a dozen times a day. So I'm slightly worried I would hit the 2400 hours per year on the seagate drive (6 and a half hours per day). In total I would probably write between 4-8 tb towards the hard drive on a yearly basis. Unless the hard drive had to be formatted/fully copied again, then it's more.

• In order, what would be most important for me would be:
  • Total amount of storage (price)
  • Noise
  • Total life span of the product (failure rate)
  • Quick access towards the drive
  • Data transfer speed

As a last thing, something important to mention is I would buy 2 of these hard drives, one serving as a back-up, and one which would see every day use multiple times a day.

I know this is quite a detailed post but I'm looking to make an informed decision before I make my purchase, would it still make sense to purchase the seagate drive for my uses? I've seen other reddit posts mention it should mainly be used as cold storage. Any feedback is appreciated, thank you.

These are the manuals I was able to find of both models:

https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/content/dam/toshiba-ss-v3/master/en/storage/product/data-center-enterprise/MG10-Product-Manual//_rev.02.pdf

https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/migrated-assets/www-content/product-content/barracuda-fam/barracuda-new/en-us/docs/Seagate_BarraCuda_SATA_Product_Manual_210203200.pdf

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/iizakill on 2025-07-22 22:19:59.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/brimrod on 2025-07-22 21:50:32.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/OldManBrodie on 2025-07-22 21:28:16.

I found an old binder of CDs in a box the other day, and among the various relics of the past was an 8-disc set of National Geographic Maps.

Now, stupidly, I thought I could just load up the disc and browse all the files.

Of course not.

The files are all specially encoded and can only be read by the application (which won't install on anything beyond Windows 98, apparently). I came across this guy's site who firgured out that the files are ExeComp Binary @EX File v2, and has several different JFIF files embedded in them, which are maps at different zoom levels.

I spent a few minutes googling around trying to see if there was any way to extract this data, but I've come up short. Anyone run into something like this before?

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/budderlovr on 2025-07-22 20:47:41.

Currently I have a Raid 5 MDADM array of 3 16TB hard drives which is almost full, what would be the minimum amount of drives I would need to buy to get everything converted to ZFS?

Can I do something like a 2 drive raid 5, move one drive worth of stuff over, then add the now empty drive to the ZFS raid or make a raid 0 in ZFS, move stuff, add another drive and make it into a Raid 5?

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/NailusHunter on 2025-07-22 20:22:42.

I recently got a 18 tb hdd and want to move all my media (Movies , shows , videogames ,comics etc )form two 4 tb external to the new 18tb drive

First time moving that many files (6.9 tb ) , so what should I do ? Do I move all and let my computer on all night or Should I move it in parts , like let say 100 gb and then another 100 gb and so on ?

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/sshwifty on 2025-07-22 20:05:50.

https://preview.redd.it/n17kiun2fhef1.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=379fcd744e996bf68dfc9c880894cb125411a089

I saw these at an estate sale (where I got unopened Bluray disks). Wiki says they ran 1995-2002 and this 2gb was the largest capacity. I only used some ZIP disks before transitioning to CD/DVD and then flash memory.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Top-Goose9198 on 2025-07-22 20:04:13.

I have around 10tb of amassed video files some of which would be hard to replace. It is spread across various PCs and portable drives. Every few months I back up everything to a 12tb external HDD. When I do this, I delete everything from the back up HDD and then copy the new data. If there an efficient way of only saving changes rather than having to write it all to the disk each time? Probably less than 5% of the data changes between back ups. I don't want to go down the route a nas / raid array as I don't have the time / space / knowledge. Thanks.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/nsomnac on 2025-07-22 18:53:25.

My team has travelled the world performing human subjects research and have curated a collection of cybersecurity data which contains both biometric, activity, and survey data from subjects as they completed a series of cybersecurity challenges. The whole data collection is roughly 4TB. Included in this collection are time sequenced application, keystroke, command, brainwave, heart rate, and galvanic skin response logs. The data is structured by event/subject/challenge/activity/media-type.

I'm looking for a way to archive the raw data (and our analysis) for public consumption. Ideally something cheap to free as we are not funded to pay for data hosting - albeit we are required to make the data publicly available.

Recommendations or suggestions appreciated. I've looked at archive.org, and while i think i can store all the data there... it wouldn't be in any reasonably organized structure for ease of reuse... so not entirely sure if that's the right place to park it.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Big_Procedure6420 on 2025-07-22 15:20:46.

A YouTuber I'm archiving deleted a video off of YouTube and the only way to access it is through the Spotify mirror. I have searched google for any Spotify video downloaders, but since Spotify downloaders are only known for downloading audios, there doesn't seem to be any. If anyone knows a way, please reach out to me in the comments. Thank you!

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/manzurfahim on 2025-07-22 14:24:17.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/iamhigherleveling on 2025-07-22 14:01:23.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/mrsilver76 on 2025-07-22 13:47:11.

I’ve been working on a small command-line tool (Windows, macOS, Linux) that helps organise large photo/video dumps - especially from old drives, backups, or camera exports. It might be useful if you’ve got thousands of unstructured photos and videos spread all over multiple locations and many years.

You point it at one or more folders, and it sorts the media into albums (i.e. new folders) based on when and where the items were taken. It reads timestamps from EXIF (falling back to file creation/modification time) and clusters items that were taken close together in time (and, if available, GPS) into a single “event”. So instead of a giant pile of files, you end up with folders like “4 Apr 2025 - 7 Apr 2025” containing all the photos and videos from that long weekend.

You can optionally download and feed it a free GeoNames database file to resolve GPS coordinates to real place names. This means that your album is now named “Paris, Le Marais and Versailles” – which is a lot more useful.

It’s still early days, so things might be a bit rough around the edges, but I’ve already used it successfully to take 10+ years of scattered media from multiple phones, cameras and even WhatsApp exports and put them into rather more logically named albums.

If you’re interested, https://github.com/mrsilver76/groupmachine

Licence is GNU GPL v2.

Feedback welcome.

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/friolator on 2025-07-22 12:32:23.

Just curious what folks are doing for this. We have stacks of dead drives (probably close to 50 at this point) that have just been set aside in a box over the years. In most cases they are drives that were in RAID 5 or RAID 6 Arrays that failed, but some are not - old system drives, and could contain some sensitive data.

The drives from RAIDs are probably fine since the rest of the RAID isn't there to reconstitute the data (and on those, there was never anything sensitive). But the individual drives from workstations are the ones I'm more concerned about

My uncle used to work in IT for a bank. They had a drill press and would drill 2-3 holes in each drive then fill it with gorilla glue, he said. Seems effective, and cathartic, but probably overkill for our purposes.

What's a good way to more or less wipe anything left on the platters on a drive that won't even mount (so zeroing them out won't work), before we send these off for recycling? What about SSDs?

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Neurrone on 2025-07-22 04:19:56.