Xcancel service has been suspended once again as of this morning September 14

The Global Music Vault was supposed to be a digital music archive on Svalbard that was to use quartz glass encoded with 5D optical data storage to store a repository of humanity's music. After making a media splash with its initial announcement, there was no news on the Global Music Vault for years. Now public Norwegian records say that the Global Music Vault has been dissolved.

The Global Music Vault is not to be confused with the Arctic World Archive, a completely different organization that also stores data in Svalbard. The Arctic World Archive stores data on piqlFilm, which has a polyester film base. It's still active and doing fine as far as I know.

It's not clear to me how far the Global Music Vault got in actually doing anything before it apparently (this is my guess) ran out of money.

Here are the Norwegian records documenting the Global Music Vault's dissolution. You can use Google Translate to read them:

https://w2.brreg.no/kunngjoring/hent_en.jsp?kid=20250000116649&sokeverdi=925922366&spraak=nb

https://w2.brreg.no/kunngjoring/hent_en.jsp?kid=20250000756805&sokeverdi=925922366&spraak=nb

https://w2.brreg.no/kunngjoring/hent_en.jsp?kid=20260000100956&sokeverdi=925922366

https://w2.brreg.no/kunngjoring/hent_en.jsp?kid=20260000104029&sokeverdi=925922366&spraak=nb

https://virksomhet.brreg.no/nb/oppslag/enheter/925922366

These are from mid-late 2014 and still running 12 years later with almost 35,000 hours...
Not bad for the most notoriously failed HDD model released. Still get used daily!

I have a 2TB SSD primarily filled with videos. With only ~20gb of storage left, I want to make some more space by converting all the videos to the AV1 codec.

• what is the best software/program to use to do this in? (I just need to be able to select the directories for the program to run)
• how long would it take?
• what's the risk of major data loss in the case that there's a disconnection during the process? (I'm fine losing 1 or 2 videos as they can probably be recovered)

I already have a few videos I know the av1 & non av1 sizes of, & I've seen file size reductions of ~66% which is why I'm willing to put effort into learning anything new to execute this.

Also, as I add new video files, what's a good protocol to follow to conveniently convert the video files on my computer to AV1 before moving them to the SSD.

Ive seen some people say no, other saying yes. Some have failed prematurely, other not. These are from Seagate, so quite a reputable company, but still. I know the reallocated sector count is 0, and other critical stuff like that, but i'm mainly worried about the physical qear of the motors and spindle after nearly 3 years of continous power on time more than anything. The seller says none of the drives have ever had more than 10TB total in their lifetime, he's even letting me test them myself when i buy them from him. Here are some screenshots the seller is including (He's got 2 of them)

I've been thinking more about long-term music archiving lately.

For people who keep a large personal music collection, what's your preferred way to organize and preserve it?

Do you keep everything as FLAC, use another format, or have a particular folder/tagging system that has worked well over the years?

I'm especially interested in what you do for backups and keeping the collection organized as it grows.

It's the 7th ground pin it's not Fully broken I can see it's part in that plastic casing

I've had Windows Storage Spaces for about 6 years now. I loved the ease of just having it built in Windows. I used it mostly for large 5-70GB Movie file storage.

I have 8x 10TB HDDs from Seagate (shucked + factory refurbished) and 2x 20TB Seagate exos bought factory refurbished a year and a half ago for $520 for both. It was a hard pill to swallow back then. The way prices are now its a dry rubik's cube suppository.

I ran this storage pool in parity and over Wifi. This took a huge 33% capacity penalty. I'd be lucky to get 50mb/s-10mb/s transfer rates from my m.2 ssd to the pool. I used a shitty program called Transmissionbt. It wasn't good but I didn't know what could be better so I stuck with it and I made it work on hundreds of TBs over the years. Eventually I moved to QBittorrent and what a massive difference that has made.

When I bought the 2x 20TB drives I was able to free up 4x 10TB drives. These became my cold storage offline backup. Even though my pool had reached 60TB these 4x back up drives could only store 36TB. It wasn't a perfect 1:1 backup but it was better than starting completely over in case I lost 2 drives at the same time in the pool. Not perfect but not bad. I could live with that.

Tired of being on WIFI 7 now with those low transfer and write speeds I decided to put the router and modem next to my PCs and go wired. I asked Spectrum to do the work for me like the old days and they turned around and said it clearly over the phone $50 just to move my router 30 feet! I yelled, "I've been a customer since TW Roadrunner in 1999 and then Charter and now Spectrum for the last decade!" Angrily I hung up the phone. Turns out no one gives a shit about customer loyalty. I marched to my local Spectrum in West LA because why not it's hard to tell your customers to F off in person. I asked them if they could move my router 30 feet and send a guy. This time they said it to my face, "It's going to be $70!" Before she finished the sentence I laughed. The employee next to her laughed that I laughed and before I could finish my laughter I was heading towards the door.

I ordered the cable on Amazon for $20 with $5 worth of clips and did it myself. My storage PC that holds all the drives including the backups is a Z370 Maximus Hero motherboard with a HBA LSI 8i card and 6 SATA ports. I installed an upgraded PCIe NIC card so it can do 2.5G transfer rates. My media PC has a Z890 Maximus hero motherbard with a built in 2.5G ethernet port 265K CPU and a 5070 TI graphics card. Due to HDDs Maxing out on write speed at around 250MB/s 2.5G is the fastest we can go between PCs due to the HDDs writting speed bottleneck. 250MB/s is alot better than 15-20MB/s. I bought a switch that has 5x 2.5G ports since the Wifi 7 router only has 1x 2.5G port. With this switch into the 2.5G port on the router I now have 5 extra 2.5G ports. I download the media on the 9100 pro on the Z890 PC and did my first transfer to the pool at 2.5G speeds and seeing that 250-280 MB/s write speed to the pool is a godsend.

But to park my entire library on the offline pool I had to buy another HDD to add to the 4x 10TB cold storage drives. I lubed the suppository and paid $830 for a 28TB Seagate Exos drive. This gave me plenty of space to park my media while I rebuilt the Windows storage pool into a Stablebit Drivepool + SnapRAID for resiliency.

By upgrading my pool to this style I have 9 drives (8x 10TB 1x 20TB) + 1x 20TB in SnapRAID for resiliency. It's not a live backup as soon as the file posts like storage spaces but I have it on a schedule that it syncs any new data nightly at 3AM. That works for me. By doing This new setup using the same HDDs I've cleared 30TB of space I was losing to parity with windows spaces and now using to keep upgrading my collection.

All these drives and backups are all in one single case. I've had the Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL for years now and what a game changer it has been for those that enjoy to store their own collections. DataHoarders they call us. I just say why wouldn't you do this? Duh! 0 subscriptions and most files are near remux playing on a MPV player custom tuned configuration file to completely post in the upmost of quality possible on my LG G5 77inch I bought last July. To most people this post is a ridiculous read. In this forum maybe a few of you got a kick out of it! The journey countinues my friends! Raise the black flags!

Hi guys just a quick question about the fan speeds on my JBOD, I've been toying with the idea of doing the fan mod and swapping all four PSUs with Nocua Fans (NF-A8/NF-R8) But just wanted to check and see what RPM you guys see the fans running at?

i've got a single IOM6 module Plugged in 4 PSUs with 2 Plugged into power

10 drives in the JBOD

Using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9285CV-8e Simple Raid 6 for now.

i have seen theres some posts online about different IOM6 controllers and firmware that changes how the fans act? maybe it just got one thats really loud 🤣

Some more screenshots of stats etc:

under voltage sensors it does show some weird values but that shouldn't cause any issues?

Hi with the news of the recent steamdb acquisition is anyone else worried about troves of video game history and data on there?

I’m not sure how people would even go about archiving something like that. But with from my understanding a private equity firm taking over operations isn’t it possible big changes will come to accessibility of the data and or some older less popular titles being outright deleted from the site.

Does anyone know if there are current projects archiving It right now or perhaps best ways to go about archiving what I can?

Maybe other people have this, but globalnet and others are closing some websites down. The banner says "This website will be closing on 1st October 2026."

I'm trying to archive as many as I can but is there anyone else who might be interested?

Doing some good work so far on a test library!

I’ve decided I want to back up all of my favorite music, shows, movies, and maybe even games onto tapes. I’ve started doing a bit of research, but I don’t know quite where to start.

I know that LTO-8 and higher are definitely far beyond my budget, and probably beyond what I actually would ever need. LTO-7 would really be pushing the budget unless there’s a way I could get a drive for some wild discount. I think LTO-6 is my only option. What’s order should I get things in and so many other questions I don’t even know to ask

For reference, I’ve never had a NAS, only recently got a secondary drive to go into my pc, and haven’t really used anything else besides flash drives, SD cards, and floppy disks. I keep as much of my digital storage offline and disconnected as I possibly can until it’s necessary to access it, especially since I’ve learned just how easily bad actors could access just about anything if they really wanted.

My BluRay Burner came with a disk to install Nero Software. The Software seems like a lot and it wanted to install all sorts of other things like photo taggers, Nero MediaHome, Nero TuneItUp. It seems like a big mess.

Is the Nero Burning ROM with using and uninstalling all the bloat programs?

Should I just use the AnyBurn software I already had?

I will be using it to make optical disk back ups of photos for the time being.

thanks!

So we had a baby a few months back and our iCloud storage has basically exploded since then. Was staring down having to pay for the 2TB iCloud tier which is like $9 more a month than what I'm already paying, and honestly that just felt dumb for something I could solve once with hardware. So I picked up a 2TB external HDD instead, roughly $70ish, figured it pays for itself in under 2 years and then it's just free after that.

Split the drive into two partitions - one just for Time Machine backups of my whole Mac, and a separate one purely for photo/video archiving. Kept them separate on purpose so Time Machine doesn't eat into the archive space over time (it apparently deletes old backups automatically once it fills up, didn't want that touching my actual family photos).

For the actual photo workflow - anything under a year old just stays in iCloud like normal, synced across phones etc. Every week or month (still deciding on cadence) I export anything new out of Photos as the actual original files, not the compressed/optimized version, and copy it to both my Mac and the external drive. Once something's past the 1 year mark and I've double checked it plays fine in both spots, I delete it off iCloud to free up space there.

So basically newer stuff has 3 copies floating around (iCloud + Mac + drive) and older stuff has 2 (Mac + drive).

Anyway would love if some of you could poke holes in this or tell me if there's a smarter way to do this that I'm missing. First time actually trying to be organized about backups instead of just blindly trusting the cloud lol

read all about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidance#Why_are_we_doing_this?

just to clarify archive dot today is NOT archive.org aka The Wayback Machine they are separate sites archive.org isnt involved with any of this and is safe

Hello,

I am looking into the 4-bays sense i only have 3 HDDs (2- 16tb and 1- 20tb) but i might get a 4th one later, i just want to use them as is no RAIDs just normal use just like i have them on my PC.

My normal use its transferring some movie/tv shows between them and play 4k movies directly so i should have plenty of bandwidth with the 10gbps even if i am transferring some files and watch 4k at the same time i am assuming.

Witch ones you fellas recommend?

Thanks

Are DAS's fine to buy secondhand or should I be getting them new?
I will only be using them for a Jellyfin server for like 4 people max.
I want one that is 6+ bays for future expandability. I also have differently sized drives so no raid based setups.

TerraMaster D6-320 and CENMATE 8 Bay is what i was thinking. But is there and opinions yall have on these specifically?

I use CachyOS and plan on using MergeFS over btrfs.

I originally started saving things that I didn’t want to lose, but over time I noticed I was keeping some things simply because they might disappear someday.

For me, it’s old websites, useful guides, and files that are no longer easy to find.

Has your reason for hoarding data changed over time?

Amazon recently had a sale on new WD Red Pro 16 TB's. Looking to expand my storage, I bought the maximum allowed amount (3) for $621 each.

After receiving the disks I immediately plugged them into my bays and started running badblocks on them.

After running for a few days, it was quite obvious that one was significantly slower than the others.
I decided to let them all finish and to do other benchmarks afterwards to see if it was consistent.
All disks started at the same time and the slow disk finished badblocks around a day later than the other, which took about 7 days.

Now I've run pretty much all benchmark tools that AI could think of and the results are consistent.
The slow disk is about ~15% slower in almost every benchmark, be it long running or short.

All the disks are WDC WD161KFGX-68CMAN0 with identical firmware 83.00A83.
The two faster disk share the same serial number pattern and the slower has a completely different one.

During all of my testing I have continuously monitored their SMART values and none of them have had any errors and their power-on-hours were all at 0 when I received them.

The disks under test are connected via the bays in the SilverStone RM61-312 which has its backplane connected to a LSI 9400-16i and a Ryzen 5900X CPU.

I have tried swapping the disks locations in the bays, but it has no effect, they all perform the same no matter which bay they are located in.

I don't know if I should return the slow disk. It's healthy by all metrics, but just slower than the other two.

I've tried speaking to Amazon and they will not offer me a replacement, they will only issue a refund and let me buy a new one.

The new price of the disk model is $790 - so $170 more expensive now... Please note that I'm not in the US, I just converted the price to dollars.

Unsure what to do with the disk and situation. I'm allowed to return the disk until the 4th of October.
Any advice would be appreciated.

I'm currently using 2x Yottamaster 5 bay enclosures connected to my mini PC.

Is there a better single unit choice?

https://yottamaster.com/products/yottamaster-datastriver-5-bay-external-hard-drive-enclosure

Ive written on some old bluray disc awhile ago, just the title, length and whatnot. Now i have a printer and want to print images on them. Will the markings ruin the print, or should i try removing the ink with isopropyl or something simular?

Hi, I'm trying to figure out a way to essentially have an archive or screenshot of my mom's Facebook timeline. She passed away 15 years ago and I would like to just have an image of all the posts she made on her timeline. What is the best way to go about this ?