Hey all you beautiful selfhosters,
What are your suggestions for frugally obtaining HDDs in the current economic climate? Specifically the EU (Netherlands).
I’m looking at second hand drives, but even those go for €100+ now, with bad sectors and all.
Can we organise a collective AI datacenter robbery and doll out some stolen drives? 😁
Everyone asks “where do we get more storage?” and not “do we need to hoard all of this?”
I think a big fuel for these storage anxieties is the very real situation we’re in right now, where we’re watching the “forever Internet” erode and crumble before our eyes, and getting rug-pulled from every direction service-wise, and losing access to media we don’t have a hard copy of.
I do wish there were a better way to pool all this storage for a common library of preservation…I mean I guess Internet Archive is like that but they’re constantly under attack. All this is under heaps of legal “gray area” and obviously the media titans want to force a rental-only-own-nothing world.
Right now we kinda have to become a scattered group of amateur historians and librarians, to preserve our culture.
I don’t say this to be mean so please don’t take it this way, but I think this mentality is… privileged? If the free internet goes then so does society as we know it, and the obscure french film collections from the 80s isn’t gonna do anything for you in that new reality. The things that need to be prepped are plain text and take up no space at all, in the grand scheme of things. It is feasible to self-host a text-only version of the entirety of Wikipedia, but nobody here is talking about that. It’s as if people think there’s gonna be some middle-ground where the internet is totally shut down and somehow life goes on as normal. You’d think priorities would shift a little away from media consumption towards “oh shit how do I learn how to filter my water”.
It would sure suck if you were the only person on earth with that french film collection, but do any historians actually know how to reach you? Have you made this information available? If not, then your archive is not useful.
This has been my thinking for the very longest while. If/When the internet goes ‘somewhere’, commerce screeches to a halt, globally. We’re at a point where there is no going back to pen and paper. When commerce screeches to a halt, no one is going to be gunning for your NAS drive filled with movies. They will be gunning for whatever life sustaining resources you have to make theirs. You think people are crazy now…we’ve yet to plumb the depths of crazy.
The answer is yes.
Seconded.
With how the internet is going, I don’t think we will be able to get content from it in 5 to 10 years. It will be completely locked down, so all we have on our drives will be it. Back to mailing DVDs!
Usenet will likely still be around, and torrents are like playing whack-a-mole.
It will just be a lot harder to get to, and likely harsher laws put in place as well.
I mean, not allowing vpns for personal use would stop us all. Businesses would of course be allowed to use them.
Yes and no. We’d go back to sneakernets. :)
… But that would be significantly more unpleasantly limited than the current ways of doing things…
And sneakernets would make personal archives more valuable than ever
Because the answer to the second question is a very clear “yes”.
Yes. If I want to organize and dedupe what I have then I need enough storage to work on it, a lot of my storage is spinning rust 7-15 years old, and if I have the space I’m going to use it. I have family photos and a music library going back to 2005. Too many things like old games need custom fixes installed to work correctly on modern hardware, and the internet isn’t as permanent as it was cracked up to be.
There’s plenty of reasons to hold on to older data.
I have family photos starting in 2001, scanned/captured photos and video going back 50 years, music, and backups of all my Xbox DVDs (WTF is the original Xbox even called today?). But that’s a few terrabytes. It can all fit on a few USB sticks. (Which I do as a third level backup.)
The real space killers are the TV shows and movies that I will watch at most once every 20 years. I could delete almost all of it. But I don’t. Instead I keep looking for bigger storage options.
I’ve become much more selective with my video quality. I’ve found that 480p encoded from a raw source produces pretty acceptable quality, anything that isn’t made to be eye candy I’ll encode myself from a raw file down to 480p. There have been many things that have been very hard to find, so I feel it’s more important that they exist, rather than be in the highest definition possible. Quality of pixels is more important that quantity of pixels.
This really depends on what you’re watching it on. 480p can look fine on a phone but like garbage on a 65" OLED. I find that 720p is good for most shows that aren’t visually stunning (like Foundation) while most movies look fine in 1080p on the aforementioned OLED.
My Bravia does some magic that makes video files look better than they do on PC. I’ve started replacing many of my 2160p files with 1080p ones, the difference is often barely noticeable, depending on the quality of the respective rips.
I don’t generally go below 720p but some old stuff that hasn’t been remastered has no reason to go above 480p.
Aren’t old games pretty small though? It’s new ones that you may need a huge volume to store many of them. Depends how much we are talking of course. 2TB or 50TB?
Depends what era but generally yes. Xbox 360 seem to be in the 3-6GB range, Wii / GameCube in the 1-2GB range. Older gens are ofc smaller.
My entire gaming library is approx 200gb, but it’s curated, retro / indy focused (early 2000s to mid 2010’s)
TIL Sid Meier’s Pirates was released on Wii.
Its a really good version too. My favourite is probably the OG C64 (first love and all that) but the Wii has some real hidden gems.
People treat deleting like some dirty word, but all good collections need to be organized and pruned.
What you don’t want to hold onto The Wrecking Crew for your descendants?
Don’t get emotional
You don’t even necessarily need to delete either. If you have a ton of H.264 video you could convert it to 265 or AV1 with minimal quality loss, but huge space savings.
If you torrent that means stopping seeding tho
My only complaint is that lots of my streaming devices don’t natively support newer codecs. So if I convert everything to AV1, my server will end up transcoding basically everything. Smart TVs are particularly bad about supporting anything past h264.
I really want to go AV1 too. Most of what I play is airplayed from my ipad to whatever so I only need my iPad to support it. But I’m not buying an iPad air just to airplay AV1.
But H265 has been prevalent for about 10 years now so basically any smart TV made in the last 3 years should support it. And if yours don’t then any el cheapo smart tv stick should.
Yeah, the *Arr stack has effectively eliminated the need to permanently retain media. I want to watch something? I just request it, and 10-20 minutes later it is available on my server. I tend to treat *Arr requests the same way I used to treat Blockbuster trips. It takes a few minutes to get what you want to watch, but that’s also a chance to make some popcorn, grab a beer, and settle in.
I only (“only”) keep ~25-30TB of media available at any one moment. And even that is plenty. It’s literally hundreds of movies and TV shows. And if I want to purge old content, that’s easy to do too. Hell, I can even sort by the last time it was watched, and start with the shit that hasn’t been touched in like 18 months.
Same, I fight the consumerist urge to
catch them allkeep everything, but instead shoot for a lower need to purchase more and consume more hardware. Electricity is cheap where I live, so downloading, then deleting shows that I and my household are unlikely to watch again for many years just makes more sense.The answer is 42.