I had to wipe my Mac two months ago and I haven't been able to use my Backblaze backup since. When I try to Inherit Backup State, nothing happens. I've been going back and forth with their support team for weeks and I keep getting the same canned "have you tried turning it on and off again?" spiel.

I've had Backblaze in some form or another since 2019. They used to be awesome, reliable, great support, affordable... now this. A thing I paid for and can't use, because they just can't update their software correctly. Before this, I couldn't restore my files, because the date entry field in the web restore UI just straight up wouldn't work.

Anyone else getting lousy service from Backblaze lately?

What would be the best , most affordable temporary cloud storage option? My old laptop is dying on me (disk error) and I need to back it up just long enough to be able to afford an external drive with some decent storage on it. I’m big on privacy, I know I may need to pay a little because all the free options I’ve found have a small limit of data and I would rather not have all my data so scattered , I’d rather be able to keep it all in one (safe) place. Money is really tight right now so I’d really love suggestions if anyone has any

I have been poking around RustFS since it went GA. Thinking about it to accomplish my multi-site 3-2-1 back up scheme. Haven't tried storage replication over WAN., but so far I really like it.

Has anyone else poked around with it?

Was participating on a question here about "what is the oldest drive you still have operational" I answered my DS414J Synology 16TB SHR NAS, submitted...saw that Golden Gate had finally been released for my M4 Mac, and started the update process. I was way too concerned/distracted with the notice floating around that Mac would soon be favouring Silicon over Intel, and a lot of apps would not be supported anymore and could not get a straight answer if it was Golden Gate or the next operating system (whatever that is going to be) that I had no idea AFP was no longer going to be supported with Golden Gate.

The update finished, and despite multiple restarts and shutdowns it took way too long for me to realise AFP was no longer supported.

I panicked/grieved and spent money I don't have to buy a 16TB external hard drive (should arrive today) using old Macs I have (won't go higher than high sierra) that support AFP and mount to the NAS automatically, I would connect my new 16TB and start manually dragging everything off.

Then Erase the 4 x 4TB internal drives and use them however I wanted.

I am still stuck on this plan

Then my Plex Server on my main Synology, a DS1821+ kept unmounting, so I got recommended Automounter, I installed that and luckily that fixed the problem, but it also detected the DS414J, it couldn't mount it unless I installed the helper app, I did and after not having it for 2 weeks, now mounts like this never happened.

Now I am stuck between 3 options.

1. Move everything to the new external 16TB, erase the internal 4 x 4TB drives, and use them however I want.

2. Since the DS414J is only Cancelled TV Shows and Ongoing TV Shows, the biggest being Cancelled TV (9TB) I would put that all on the external 16TB, freeing up 9TB from the NAS, and 7TB left on the 16TB, and then offload potentially 2 other drives onto the DS414J, thus freeing them up.

3. Just leave everything as it is and have a brand new 16TB that I have no idea what to do with.

The main things that worry me is if Automounter is ever no longer supported, I would not be able to mount to the DS414J anymore, I was convinced I didn't/couldn't switch from AFP to SMB (I tried multiple times but nothing worked) I guess it did but it only works through Automounter.

And the internal 4 x 4TB drives in the DS414J NAS, the power on cycles/hours are

Drive 1: 49731, Drive 2: 49714, Drive 3: 49710, and for some strange reason Drive 4: 3811

It says they are "healthy" and no errors come up when I run S.M.A.R.T tests, so if I do decide to wipe and use them individually, I don't know how long each drive will last.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Does anyone know if there is any way to download it?

I shut down twice a day. Never considered the wear and tear on my 3 HD’s or is it not a big deal?

I have to back up maybe 10 TB of data, and some of it involves researching people who don't want to be researched. I have a couple friends storing a drive for me, but I need something that doesn't depend on another person. I've priced regular storage bins, safe deposit boxes, and the cloud, but they're either too expensive or require a minimum balance or renter's insurance. Any other ideas?

I need something to back up my library, in case I run out of storage or my drives get corrupted. My plan is to back them up, and if I ever need them, I can transfer a few of them to my laptop so I can use them on my plex server or play a specific game.

Hello friendos. First time poster

TLDR; I have some old 2000s PC CD Games I would like to backup and make ISOs of.

The tricky thing is navigating the old SafeDisc or SecuRom DRM.

Any recommended tools to make ISOs I can use to install my games? Linux or Windows options welcome. TIA

Is it worth switching from Google to Immich? Many people have recommended it to me; what exactly makes Immich better or more convenient?

I don't trust cloud services, though Google collapsing is the least likely scenario. The only downsides are the cost and the risk of my account getting locked for some trivial reason—though I honestly don't know what illegal act I’d have to commit to actually get banned.

LTO (Linear Tape-Open) tape drives cost anywhere from $2,000 to over $5,000+ because they are precision enterprise-grade hardware built for a limited, specialized market rather than everyday consumers. [1, 2, 3]

Key Reasons LTO Drives Are Expensive

• Niche Enterprise Market: LTO technology is built for data centers, broadcasters, and large-scale archives. Low manufacturing and sales volume mean companies cannot spread research, development, and tooling costs across millions of units like they do with hard drives or SSDs. [1, 2, 3, 4]
• Extreme Mechanical Precision: A tape drive must guide microscopic magnetic tape past a read/write head at speeds over 100 inches per second while packing hundreds of thousands of tracks onto a half-inch strip of media. Achieving this level of mechanical tolerance requires high-grade motors, optical sensors, and precision alignment parts. [1, 2]
• Buffer and Interface Requirements: To prevent "shoe-shining"—a damaging condition where the tape repeatedly stops, reverses, and restarts because the data stream is too slow—drives require fast onboard caches and enterprise interfaces like SAS or Fibre Channel (though Thunderbolt options exist, they drive up the cost further). [1, 2, 3]
• Licensing and Standards: LTO is an official consortium-driven standard (developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Quantum). Certification, backward-compatibility engineering (reading/writing multiple generations back), and high-reliability error-correction features add to the overhead. [1]

Where Tape Actually Saves Money

While the drive has a high entry cost (often $2,000 to $4,500+), the media (individual cartridges) is inexpensive per terabyte and lasts up to 30 years offline—making it dramatically cheaper than hard drives or cloud storage once your archive scales past tens or hundreds of terabytes. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Google

Hi, I hope this is an ok place to ask this, I haven't bought a hard drive in about 10 years and I need an upgrade.

I'm looking for above 4tb and something easy to leave connected to the tv to watch my dvd rips.

I thought my current Transcend storejet was huge at 1tb when I bought it but it's been full for a long time now. Still works brilliantly though so my first thought was to buy a bigger one of those but I thought I'd see if anyone knew of better options first. Thanks!

Hey everyone! I’m looking to invest in a NAS setup for photography, 4K video editing, and long-term file storage.

Current setup:
MacBook Pro M4 Max, 36GB RAM, 1TB SSD (almost full)
Two 1TB external drives (one completely full)
Adobe Premiere Pro, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop
I’m tired of constantly running out of storage and want something reliable, fast, and expandable that won’t need replacing in a couple of years.

I’ve been considering UGREEN NASync, but I’m open to Synology, QNAP, or other recommendations.

Budget: Around $500 upfront, with the ability to invest $75–$100 monthly toward a better setup.
Would you recommend buying a budget NAS now or saving for a higher-end 4-bay system? Also, is editing 4K directly from a NAS realistic, or should I stick with my external SSD for active projects?

Looking for the best long-term value, including a reliable backup solution. Appreciate any recommendations!

So I accidentally ended up with two media directories one capitalized the other lower case. Both have different files and the same files. How can I merge and make the duplicates go away..?

I’m currently running a Synology DS920+ with upgraded RAM to handle all my personal and family self-hosting needs. It’s hosting a bunch of Docker containers for everything from photo archiving (Immich) and password management (Vaultwarden) to local AI (Ollama). Everything runs smoothly, but I’ve noticed my HDD capacity is slowly filling up. I used to never worry about storage when spinning up new containers, but it’s finally becoming an issue, so I’m planning to double my capacity. Right now, I have 4 x 4TB drives in RAID 5 (giving me around 12TB of usable space).

​I’m traveling to Japan with my wife this Christmas, and I noticed drive prices are significantly lower there — I could save around €50 to €70 per drive on 4 x 8TB HDDs, plus get an extra 10% tax-free discount with my EU passport.

​My main concern is safely transporting 4 hard drives back to Europe. Specifically:

​Airport Security Scanners: Will the airport X-ray or magnetic scanners risk damaging the drives?

​Luggage vs. Carry-on: Is it safer to pack them tightly in checked luggage (where they might get handled roughly) or bring them in my carry-on (where they’ll go through multiple security checkpoints)?

​Security Checks: How do airport security officers typically handle loose hard drives? Is there any risk they'd try to tamper with or disassemble them?

​Any tips or advice from the community on the best way to handle this would be greatly appreciated!

I came down stairs to the postman dropping the mail out of his delivery trolley from waist height onto the floor. I actually think landing on the corner might have softened the blow because there's such a crumple zone.

This box contained 3x 28TB Seagate ironwolf drives.

They were wrapped up in bubble wrap and packed pretty tightly in the box with those inflatable soft plastic bubbles.

How fragile are these drives? Do I need to be worried?

I have 3 other deliveries, two of them were delivered by the same guy, one is still to come. I know he dropped at least one of those boxes the same way and it landed flat.

Hi everyone. I tried looking up on the Internet about this, but all the big "Steam-related" websites doesn't seem to have what I am looking for. On Steam, game devs/publishers can add their own profile pictures for others to use, which can be selected by the player. You don't even need to own said game to use them.

Specifically, I am talking about these: https://steamcommunity.com/actions/GameAvatars/ - This page, while there several of them, does not show all the games that have default game avatars. It will only show games you own, and a random batch of games you do not own.

I'd love to hoard ALL of the default game avatars for every game that features them, and perhaps upload to Archive.org. Websites like SteamDB, SteamCardExchange or Steam.tools don't seem to have anything about them. SteamCardExchange has Animated Avatars, but these aren't the ones I am looking for (which are static).

I am someone who recently stopped using other people's work as profile pictures, considering I didn't had permission to use them in the first place. I am aware a lot of people does this anyway, but it's a me thing. Nowadays, I only use things that comes from official sources (screenshots, renders, artworks), from artists that explicitly say that you are allowed to use it, or my own work.

These Default Game Avatars would fall under "official source", and I am someone that every once in a while in a mood to change profile pictures. Having all of them saved would be very useful and helpful.

There are more details here, where I suggested making a program that could check what games have the page available ( https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/GameID/Avatar/List ), and saving all instances of "_full.jpg" files, which are the largest resolution available for those avatars on Steam:

https://reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1x5dn8c/list_of_all_games_with_standard_avatars/?

Thanks!

Edit:

One thing that I thought doing is perhaps a way to "send" an API request to Steam, spoofing that I own every single game on Steam (of course this wouldn't be a hack that would make me own and play these games, just telling Steam servers that I "own" every game ever), therefore, showing every game that has avatars on the https://steamcommunity.com/actions/GameAvatars/ URL. This could be done in parts (1000 AppIDs per instance, for example), since I assume the page wouldn't load or crash if every single game was shown at once.

This would make it easier to know what games have avatars in the first place, so whenever a script / program was ready to be launched, every single AppID with them would be included from the get-go, without having to guess what games have these avatars.

I plugged it in and things sound fine. I can’t believe they wouldn’t just put it in a box.

Do you think it’ll be alright or should I send it back?

I ran first aid on my mac and it looked fine.

Are there other tests I should do?

So you've probably read the story of how scammers have managed to not only spoof SMART hours in seagate drives but also the deeper previously unchangeable FARM hours as well.

I recently got some drives for a low price. They are in good working order with no bad sectors detected and the FARM and SMART hours match in value. It was manufactured in 2024 so I'm not expecting a massive number but I would still like to find a way to check if the FARM hours have been tampered in any way.

has anyone figured out a way to do this?

I have a 4 bay Ugreen Nas RAID 5 array with 26 tb recertified Exos seagate SSDs. I ran the smart tests through the ugreen app, rapid and full and everything seems to be in order. What are the other tests I should run on my drives before I start using them. Some of the tests I read about seemed destructive if you already made your storage pool with RAID. I use this for editing so I want it to be solid. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Ok, so this might seem an odd question but I'm currently in the process of secure erasing two 6tb drives to return them. As you all know, this is a long process and gets worse the larger the capacity.

As I understand it, it's much quicker to secure erase an encrypted drive as it's mainly a process of securely erasing the encryption keys?

Is it worth pre-emptively encrypting new drives to mitigate the pain later on (and also has a bonus of protecting your data in case of theft).

Or, is there another option I'm missing? If I've got all this wrong do let me know as I'm just a home user learning as I go.

In the last couple days, I remember reading a post on here where someone said "It's okay I have all my stuff on the cloud." If you don't know, three data centers in Russia got blown up. You don't want to be making a video like this woman in the future.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1x4un07/a_russian_woman_is_whining_that_her_yandex_disk/