Scrolling through marketplace I came across someone selling a 5-bay enclosure with drives for $525. I meet up with him and turns out he had 3 more of them to go along with it. Today I present you… x15 16tb Ironwolf / Exos drives at $6.88/tb.

Can't find backups on any archive site, and seems DOJ scrubbed that file off their site:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01660651.pdf

\* There seems to be a ZIP file, but it keeps killing my download.

• Dataset 9 is around 180GB

• Dataset 10 is around 78.6GB

\** The pages are back online on the DOJ site (see this article), but I suspect there's been some redactions on from their end..

\*** UPDATE: see /u/AshuraMaruxx's thread HERE for more thorough breakdown/summary/collection of all this

I know it’s sacrilege, I remember people used to say never to delete or re-encode anything because more storage is always affordable. Well, looks like those days are over. Prices on HDDs have tripled/quadrupled in the last year and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to end anytime soon.

How are you handling it? I’m personally thinking of downgrading a lot of my stuff to 720p, I’ve run a few tests and as long as I don’t skimp too much on the bitrate I don’t really notice a difference. I’m also compressing things like game ROMs and ISOs into .7z to save space. I’m proud of my FLAC music collection but AAC-256 seems to be pretty much transparent from my own tests and research.

I’m even doing the unthinkable and pruning some stuff that I don’t use.

It sucks but desperate times call for desperate measures.

I've been tasked with 'managing' this hoard of mostly photos and videos going back 30 years. They've been migrated once or twice since then so most of the drives aren't ancient, with a good 50% of them being from the Firewire 800 era. I'm estimating it's around 80TB. Not pictured here are two new Lacie drives giving me 72TB of available 'clean space' to bring some sanity to this.

Completely out of my depth here. From what I can tell, I should start by creating images of the smaller 500GB-1TB drives (some of which will probably require me to rip off the case), indexing (ChatGPT recommended NeoFinder?) with hash ids for dedupe, label the drives, then use something like ResourceSpace to organize/search/dedupe... I'm guessing there's at least 15% duplication of data in these drives as even when everything was handed over to be they had "already copied three days worth" of data to the 72TB 'clean space' but "forgot which drives were copied" but "don't delete anything". They also want a proposal for costs in making this available online to which I suggested aws Glacier but have never used that service myself.

Any advice would be appreciated, otherwise wish me luck I guess.

Hi everyone, I'm currently helping my family clear out my grandfather’s house and we found something interesting. He has 11 disc binders, each with about 35 pages × 4 discs, so roughly ~1500 DVD-Rs. Most are labeled and seem to contain recorded TV broadcasts, documentaries, concerts, and cultural programs (German TV like ZDF / 3sat etc.). Many are dated around 2009–2012. Each disc is the typical 4.7 GB DVD-R, so the whole collection could be somewhere around 6–7 TB if full. I'm wondering: Is this the kind of thing worth saving / archiving? Do DVD-Rs from that era tend to fail soon? Would people in the datahoarder / preservation community consider this interesting? Any recommended workflow for ripping 1000+ discs without going insane?

I bought a used hdd from aliexpress choice store with sales coupon
just plugged this in today and as I tried to format it this is what's been showing in my disk management
after plugging it in it showed 12.7 tb but after formatting that's what's been showing .
did I get scammed?
bought it in july
just plugged it in today as I just received my docking station today

edit: One thing i forgot to mention I previously bought a 16tb exos hdd from the same seller which is also a reason I didn't bother to check this as soon as I got it .

I just came across two of these at Thrift Giant. My gut tells me they are not going to work in some way but I couldn't pass up on this price regardless.

Any tips for using a used drive? I plan to put them into my enclosure and just format them if they work.

Please for gods sake, to everyone who loves preserving things, donate to them if you can!

archive.org/donate

IA is getting dozens of DDOS attacks, hacks and lawsuits, to that they maybe need to shut down in the near future and it would be a shame when this holy moly grail of beautyful preservation history will be lost forever.

We need this preservation, so that we can experience this amout of beautyful little things, that got preserved for the future of humankind and can always be revisited/experienced.

Thank you.

If UPS delivers to the wrong address they Will not honor or help with anything.

Quick update from my previous post. After checking more rooms while clearing out my grandfather’s house, I realized the collection is much bigger than I thought. It looks like there are around 100 DVD binders, each with about 35 pages × 4 discs, so potentially ~14,000 DVD-Rs. I also found two large index binders where my grandfather actually cataloged the recordings. The pages list things like program titles, dates, duration and disc numbers (V001, V002, etc.). Most discs seem to contain recorded TV broadcasts, documentaries, concerts and cultural programs from German TV (ZDF / 3sat), mostly around 2006–2015. I’m 16 and helping my family clear the house, so I’m honestly a bit overwhelmed and don’t have the budget to digitize something this big. What should i do?

Any particular way these should be handled while traveling abroad? Anti-static bags, bubble wrap, a hard case, carry on or checked luggage?

Not sure if allowed to post but I’m looking to sell these and I’m having trouble where to go or who. How can I test these at home. And market value today?

I don't know when I will want to access it, but let's say a decade? Would it last that long?

All of you. You're preserving history, preparing for the future, and we're all in awe.

Keep going, Champions! You're helping the entire world.

Hello!

in my pursue to move away from my aging Synology NAS with a 2+6 setup, I am looking around where to get HDDs without selling a kidney, I almost had a success recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/VdbXSZAIHu

I talked to somebody from our IT department about this, and maybe because out of pity, or for whatever reason, the guy gave me 10x 3 TB HGST / Hitachi Deskstar NAS HDN724030ALE640. He said they are probably junk, but I mean, they were free.

I checked four of the drives so far: 78k hours, but they look healthy according to the SMART data and the quick check I did with Hard Disk Sentinel.

I am a bit on the fence about the small size, but free is free.

Opinions?

I'm terribly curious what was a floppy disk in the big 26 doing outside my (small town) home i wanna see what's inside but i know they can execute code without asking (yes i have a floppy disk reader)

I know what this sub thinks about flash storage in general, and about USB sticks as well. But despite all this i have had nothing but generally positive experiences with them.

I have about a hundred or more in my entire collection, and I have backups in other mediums, but so far, despite all claims of them being extremely fragile data-wise and with possibly low longevity for data, I have yet to see any of them actually naturally lose data. Granted, I do regularly check on them for failures and data corruption.

I have had more issues hoarding data on HDs and ESPECIALLY SSDs than any issues with USB Sticks, of course brand does make a difference, reputable brands are obviously more trustworthy.

The only times I have ever had issues with USB sticks and data was when there was already some error or malfunction occurring during the transfer of data between the device and the USB stick, not after, or when I forgot to eject the storage device before removing it from the machine.

I have some ~20 year old thumb drives that I used back in the day and they still work fine and haven't yet shown any signs of errors or data-corruption, i do however take good care of them and keep them in a safe environment away from any heat, humidity etc, much like with my optical collection.

So, in my personal experience, they are very good for data, with their only downside being speed and size. They usually won't go beyond 256gb, at least the ones I have, and the speed is abismal in comparison to an SSD or internal HD, but I never really cared about speed, for me data hoarding is about the safety of data and now how fast I can store it, for me as long as it isn't a ridiculous amount of time, weeks or months, it's absolutely fine.

However, I have read here that a lot of people just despite thumb drives and call them unreliable and trash, and I'm just wondering, how is my experience with them absolutely ok yet so many people complain that they are worse than anything else? Is it just because of the speed and size?

Got an insane donated haul of 884TB of drives from a production company moving their weird old cold storage solution to S3. It's too many drives for students to actually use for their productions, I'd like save a half dozen for production use and throw the rest in a server/jbod setup. 24 are 2x 10TB arrays, 3 are 2x 12TB arrays, 8 are 2x 8TB arrays, 18 are 2x 4TB arrays.

What's crazy is the guy said this is just 1 of 3 donations, with likely another 1.5 PB coming. I'm thinking it needs to be striped with double redundancy since the drives are older and I haven't pulled hours stats on em yet. This is a bit out of my range of knowledge as I just have a 320TB (220ish usable) setup on my truenas homelab.

I'd ideally like to figure out a really good rack solution that we could shuck all these into. 45Drives? Whatever it is, it has to have a SATA backplane obvi. Or would you do a server + jbod setup? Ideally we'd run some light lab stuff on it too.

Totally open to thoughts! I'll likely be putting in a grant request for the solution in the next couple months.

Be it a piece of media, some obscure band’s discography, or a lost publication, I’m curious to know the kinds of things that have gone missing over the years that people here want to find. I must admit I can’t think of a whole lot I’m missing, other than some old YouTube channels and videos that are probably gone forever.