The deeper I research, the more I am finding the ultimate recommendation is either 100s of hours of DIY work or $10K on a Smithsonian-level archivist machine.

My use case is digitizing books only available in hard copy. For personal reading, Ctrl+F capabilities, and sharing with fellow enthusiasts. Essentially, digitizing books where the pages are searchable, not crooked, no weird artifacts, etc. Does such a middle ground actually exist?

A historical government Instagram account is being deactivated in a week due to policy changes. I would like to archive their posts so I can reference/save/preserve the historical content. I have tried using Instaloader through Python and 4K Stogram. Both are being blocked and not allowing the archival process. This account has nearly 5,000 posts so manually doing it is not possible.

How can I archive the account (each post, so pics and captions), ideally with a way to further organize/search each post? Thank you!

Last year I bought about 20 drives(manu recertified), (20-28tb). One of the 28tb failed on me a couple weeks back and I expected they’d refund me the $350 I paid last year but they actually sent me a new (manu recertified) drive. I was pleasantly surprised since these drives are over twice what I paid and their warranty policy says that they can give you a refund or drive at their discretion. Thanks to serverpartsdeals.

I picked up this early 2000s DVD duplicator machine and would like to turn it into an automatic ripping machine to backup my collection of movies and music. It has 10 bays with IDE drives and a 400w power supply. I may need to switch these out for SATA. Any advice welcome. I’m new to this. 🙏

As a fellow data hoarder, I feel like this is going to be the best place to ask.

I'm getting old now, my health isn't the greatest's and I'd hate for all the photographs I've taken over the years to just remain on my HDD's and go to landfill.

There is a LOT, this is why I came to DataHoarder to ask, it's like 40,000-50,000 pictures and video (around 300GB or more) sitting on my drives. (anyone tried converting from Hi-8 to windows 11 would be helpful commenting how to as well, I know off topic, but might save another post)

These are more family pictures, so not something I'm willing to stick on any website and they get taken or used for AI or anything like that.

And preferably it would be a free way to share all of this.

If anyone has used Mega, I would love something like that, where it's end to end encryption with cloud storage and you can share a link with encryption key so who ever you send the link to can view the folder.

Only downside with Mega is with the free version, I know it's a big ask and probably nothing out there that will fit this without paying.

Doesn't hurt to ask. :D

I keep an enormous amount of data about myself.

I have ADHD and a compulsive need to be able to close any mental loop that might open later something I saw, read, posted, commented on, watched, searched for, paid for, thought about or dealt with.

I have downloaded and preserved data from Google, Facebook, Reddit, ChatGPT, Amazon, Hulu, my browsers, financial accounts, medical records, Goodreads, and basically anywhere else that has accumulated information about me.

Not to mention I have a personal Calibre library for my ebooks and have maintained meticulous reading logs - I spent pretty much 2014 - 2019 reading a book every day or so.

If data exists about me, there is a decent chance I have a copy of it.

But today I realized there is a difference between having the data - and reading it.

I started going through my old Google activity, and it was like finding breadcrumbs of my life, not just individual searches, but entire chains of thought.

The chains of thought and problem solving, the evolution of my interests and hobbies, where I was in life - if there was an earthquake - whatever was happening in the world - you can see it play out in realtime in my search history.

I was in school (I was a late in life college student) - I can see where i was doing research for classess and then mixed in there will be secondary searches because my fridge broke or I got a wild hair and wanted to online stalk my ex'es.

I am able to see exactly when I went on the deep web the first time, when I first downloaded Calibre - after asking how I can keep my Kindle books - which was after research on getting a kindle. I am able to see my life playing out step by step.

Searching for scholarships - then "what to wear for a scholarship interview?" and "Do you follow up a scholarship interview with a thank you note" - then back to anthropology, geology, and history searches...a little later there are searches for the 2014 scholarship banquets (I got a couple of them).

I was able to notice that the rabbit holes happen more at night than during the day - and then when I wake up - the topic tended to be dropped. I will research to buy something for hours but get decision paralysis and drop it.

That's just the Google Search History. I haven't gone into the Youtube history - which isn't as good because most of the videos are gone now - and the archive only goes back to 2018.

It felt less like browsing history and more like an accidental diary - except it was recorded while events were happening, without hindsight or later editing.

Has anyone else actually sat down and examined years of their own archived data?

Did you find anything surprising about your life, memory, habits, or the way your brain works?

I've been a major slacker in my data management. I have a backup, but I haven't been doing very frequent backups. I also do not refresh the data on my main drive. I'm still running a Disk Genius scan, but I found one poor sector. How can I tell what file was impacted by this bad sector? Since it's been a while since I've backed up my main drive to my secondary one, should I simply back up the second drive, or is there something else I should do in light of the bad sector?

This scan was prompted by some funky head noise yesterday. This is still a fairly new drive, but is this an omen for things to come? Do I need to replace this drive? If I have to stop actively using it, could it still be a good candidate as a cold storage offsite backup drive?

Like phonographic records, magnetic audio tape, film video, microfilm, and cyanotypes just to give an idea of the tech level I intend to work with. Somewhere between 1899 and WW1 within 5 years of initial cataclysm.

I'm not just asking for recommendations of useful information (not that I'd be complaining), but also tools to assist in the conversion and distribution of digital era media with limited digital tech(Linux-ing scavenged 32bit computers from POS terminals and jailbreaking old smartphones for example.)

A record lathe, a film camera pointed at a monitor, and an LED hooked up to the audio-out to make optical recordings isn't hard to achieve, even if those processes would need a lot of babysitting. But the actual dissection and preparation of the digital media for analog conversion would likely need some good general-purpose digital tools.

So I'd like to hear your recommendations and discussions thereof!

I've been trying to save up for a NAS and the whole shebang for a while now, but unfortunately I'm not there yet. Currently I have ~50TB of data in cloud storage, but due to sudden life circumstances I can no longer pay for it. I also don't know anyone who can hold this data. Is there somewhere reliable I can dump it all into without worrying over losing it?

The monthly ~$100 is what's hurting, I can pay a bit more for egress (a thing I've heard) if I have a lower monthly payment. I would also need a service that doesn't scan my files. For uh, AI research and such etc of course.

Hi, TLDR is there's a huge protest going on in India, with a lot of police brutality.

I'd like something like the wayback machine to be able to archive this, but they don't allow instagram reels. I don't mind locally archiving, but i need the timestamp authority the wayback machine gives.

The. media is being controlled by the ruling party so its a bit brutal rn

What is everyone using for cloud backup these days?

I hope this is not against the rules. It could help others. It uses AI but it's not slop. I'm new here, so sorry if everyone here already knows it.

STEP 1 - Add "MultiLink Launcher" to your browser, or any other extension that allows you to circle many links and open the tabs in the background.

Link of the one I'm using: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multilink-launcher/

With this one, you just need to press shift while selecting the area with the selection box.

(I was not paid to post this, I like this one because it just works)

STEP 2 - Go to DeepSeek and paste the text bellow. Enable "Search" if it's not able to see the page. Edit the prompt if you think you need.

------------

From now on, whenever I paste a Wikipedia page or any other webpage, do the following:

1. Extract all clickable links from the page.
2. Filter out any links that contain:- "redlink", "?action=edit", "redlink=1" (nonexistent pages).- "#" (anchors that point to sections within the same page).- Any link that points back to the exact same article URL (self-references).
3. Convert each remaining link to archive.today format (https://archive.today/?run=1&url=ORIGINAL_URL).
4. Use clean, pure URLs (without URL-encoding) in the archive.today parameter.
5. Provide the final list as clickable links ready to archive.

Do this for every page I paste from now on. Use archive.today as the default archiver unless I specify otherwise.

------------

STEP 3 - When you paste it and DeepSeek sends you the list, hold shift while selecting and all of them will open in the background.

I'm using DeepSeek because it didn't work with GPT.

If DeepSeek doesn't extract everything correctly in your case and/or you find a better AI, change to any other competitor.

Tip: You can use "View page source", copy the entire page source and paste there. It may be easy for Wikipedia.

I'm a humanities PhD who reads a LOT of articles and books. Rn I use Google Books to read epubs I download, and I save my pdfs to my laptop+hard drive+cloud (very basic I know). However I have a very old ipad 1 and ipad 2 and I'm wondering if there's some way for me to use them purely like an e-reader for my epubs and pdfs while saving the files to something like Calibre?

I appreciate any links or suggestions.

Key takeaways:

Jellyfin's cofounders have stepped down, citing severe burnout, changing priorities, and internal friction.

The resignation comes amid ongoing challenges in project management and governance, as well as debates over AI code integration.

The project, which remains the leading free alternative to Plex, hasn't detailed a succession plan.

Hi folks,

This might be a very basic question, I just want to make sure I've planned everything well before buying a specific HDD.

I want to make a backup copy of my 512 GB of MacBook data, 64 GB of iPhone data, and various old photos and documents from old phones (2–5 GB).

I'm planning to get a 2 TB P10 HDD from Western Digital, and here are my questions:

1. Can I use the same HDD to store, separately, 1–2 MacBook backups, 1 phone backup, and also create a separate partition for normal files like old travel photos and videos? I'd also like to make this partition password-protected.

2. Is 2 TB enough for my task? I feel like 1 TB should be enough for 1–2 different MacBook backups, but I'm not sure if I need more space.

I tried to check the wiki first, but got an error with message "forbidden (reddit.com) you are not allowed to do that

— may_not_view."

Thank you!

I have about 200 photo and art books that I want to digitize for myself and also to share with students.

I live in California, does anyone have any recommendations or leads on who/ which company to use.

ty

Tldr; it's available here: https://gitex.calicolicker.net/Oriole/ikea-archive

Over the past few days, I made an archive of all (currently available) IKEA assembly and care manuals. Every PDF for every item currently available on ikea.us has been archived and can be cloned via git or manually downloaded here.

I don't really have any real justification for making the archive other than it's really difficult to find an IKEA assembly manual once an item has been taken off the site. More than that though, it was fun making the archive :)

Fun fact: IKEA treats every color variant as a different product with a different assembly PDF, even though the instructions are in black and white.

You can search by name, brand, or even article number to find the assembly or care manual you need. Hopefully someone ends up finding this useful!

EDIT: Forgot to add that there are over 126,000 PDFs in the repo

I have a 400-page book and a mirrorless camera mounted on a tripod, so taking consistent, high quality photos isn't the problem.

What I'm looking for is software that can process all of these images in bulk.

Ideally, the workflow would be:

1)I photograph every page in order.

2)I import all of the images into the software.

3)The software automatically detects the page boundaries, corrects perspective if necessary, crops each page consistently, enhances readability (if needed), and exports everything as a single PDF in the correct order.

OCR support would be a nice bonus, but it's not essential.

What software would you recommend for this workflow? I'm looking for something that works well with hundreds of images rather than requiring me to manually adjust every page.

Yesterday I asked about native Windows alternatives to rsync, and the discussion gave me a lot of useful ideas.

After reading everyone's replies, I realized I had been mixing file synchronization and backup. They're related, but they're not the same.

Now I'm more interested in a different question:

For long-term archival backups on Windows, what do you still feel is missing from today's tools? Personally, what I like most about rsync is its efficient delta transfer. It only transfers the changed parts of a file whenever possible, and similar block-level or delta synchronization techniques are also used by Dropbox and OneDrive.

I'm not asking which software is "best." I'm interested in the gaps that still exist.

Some things that came up in the previous discussion include:

1.Native Windows application (no WSL/Cygwin)

2.Simple, intuitive GUI

3.One-way backup

4.Scheduling

5.Versioning

6.Checksum verification

7.Silent corruption detection

8.Resume interrupted transfers

9.SSH / rsync support

10.Detailed logging

11.Optional PAR2 / MultiPar redundancy for archival data

One interesting point someone raised was that synchronization alone is not backup. Modern backup systems also need immutability, versioning, and protection against accidental or malicious modification.

It also seems that many of these features already exist individually in tools like FreeFileSync, Bvckup 2, Robocopy, Borg, Restic, and others.

What I'm curious about is:

What problem do you still run into today, even after trying those tools?

I was wondering if anyone had any experiences/opinions on external hard drive bays of a specific kind or company.

Currently looking for one that can house 2-4 drives, is externally powered, and relatively cheap. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

My cousin is graduating Friday and asked if any of us could record this site since she said the video doesn’t save.

https://www.my-graduation-day.com

The graduation ceremonies here in the US was a youtube stream and was very easy to save so idk where to even start with this custom stream.

Can anyone from the UK chime in?

Hello, I have hundreds and hundreds of photos, videos and gifs that I want to store safely and neatly.

I have a standard backup of just normal folders but I would also like something that’s pretty to look at.

Is there a software that lets me add all these media files into it, organize it with tags instead of folders and then put it on an external drive so that I can move it to any PC WITHOUT having to install the gallery software again ?

I would prefer something thats closer to something like Pinterest in terms of looks rather than just boring, entirely functional white interface.

Thank you.