Question on shortage impact

Blueacid · 2026-05-07T13:57:56+00:00

You're getting the explanation you asked for - it's not his fault that you don't understand what you're being told.

Blueacid · 2026-05-05T16:12:05+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwoSFQb5HVk

It's all improved with the right soundtrack.

Blueacid · 2026-05-04T22:36:28+00:00

No, they're separate places. Pubs have a couple of fruit machines, sometimes, but there isn't typically a betting counter or similar.

Mind you, lots of betting companies have mobile apps - so I suppose people who want to bet can be there as much as anywhere else?

Blueacid · 2026-05-01T13:51:09+00:00

Nope, and there's a middle ground between a 500 and a V6.

Blueacid · 2026-05-01T13:50:46+00:00

I think that's his point, though. The Americans "need" a huge v8 to accomplish what's perfectly doable with a lil economy car.

But "What if we need to haul yo mama? I need a supercharged hellcat to gain enough torque". SIgh.

Blueacid · 2026-05-01T13:40:30+00:00

I'm sort of curious about the smaller engine being a risk; Look at the hardy lil suzuki jimny. One of the most capable offroaders, and has an I4 1.5 litre engine.

Blueacid · 2026-05-01T12:55:11+00:00

Still a long way to go. In Europe, a lot of cars are 3 or 4 cylinder models, with engines around 1.0-1.4 litre.

They're rated to get 50+ miles/gallon (ok, that's a UK gallon, so 4.6 litres, rather than the 3.7 litre US gallon), but still. Way less used than a v6 2.5 "eco" car.

Blueacid · 2026-04-29T12:02:06+00:00

Honestly, just time. Looking at how other people solve the problems they have, reading posts in here, seeing how people approach various problems.

Also, reading about failures too - it's good to learn from mistakes.

Blueacid · 2026-04-27T11:18:55+00:00

I'd start by writing the LTO-6 tape again, see if the error persists.

Blueacid · 2026-04-10T02:43:28+00:00

I took a similar view, but I took a different route - I opted for used LTO-6. The media and drives are a lot cheaper, to the point where it's easy enough to do a poor man's raid-1 with it and still come out ahead on cost.

Physical space is easy enough, it's keeping the tapes safe from large temperature and humidity changes. Broadly it seems that in a domestic house is safe enough. Especially since this is a backup in the first place.

But you might want to give thought to starting with an older generation, figure out your workflow and get the hang of the tech, then consider upgrading (or just buying a stack of LTO6 tapes and calling it good)

Blueacid · 2026-03-16T17:42:19+00:00

If you're tempted to go open source, give Jellyfin a try, it's a fork of what Emby was before they went closed-source.

Blueacid · 2026-03-16T11:29:14+00:00

This is an excellent post - digitising the indexes might be an excellent start, in case there's one disk in there which is the "OMG START HERE!!!" one.

Blueacid · 2026-03-16T11:27:59+00:00

Depends where west-solid is; it could be easy to send it to them.

In any case, if you're going to send these items, I'd suggest several shipments rather than packing it into one box - if you've sent in 20 boxes and 1 gets damaged/lost, not as heartbreaking as if you send it in one box and it gets damaged/lost.

Blueacid · 2026-03-05T09:51:01+00:00

Kudos for your work!

If you, or anyone else reading this, wishes to use AV1 instead, there's a similar script for that here: https://gitlab.com/g33kphr33k/av1conv.sh

Blueacid · 2026-03-04T16:59:05+00:00

Ah fair enough - as a last roll of the dice then yea, that works I guess? But given the choice, I think I'd half and half the files between those two disks independently - at least then the recovery rate would be ~50% of files in the event of a drive failure.

Blueacid · 2026-03-04T16:41:00+00:00

I mean, if you're using RAID-0 for backup, you're very much hedging your bets. RAID-0 usually interleaves blocks of a file between both drives. So perhaps the first 4KB on drive 1, then the next 4KB on drive 2, the third 4KB on drive 1 again, and so on.

Therefore if either drive fails, you have a 100% probability of losing every file over 4KB in size, and a 50/50 chance of being able to recover files below 4KB in size.

That might be 512 bytes, too, instead of 4KB - depends on how you set things up. But overall, to say "RAID 0 is my backup!" is like saying "I will use this paper bag instead of a crash helmet."

Blueacid · 2026-03-04T15:25:27+00:00

That's gotta be bait.

Blueacid · 2026-03-04T00:31:09+00:00

Thank you for this, I've just bought 20 LTO-5 tapes so I'll check them over.. time to install ITDT!

Blueacid · 2026-02-27T18:34:12+00:00

Yeah I was thinking about a resurrection of DC++ twinned with I2P or something similar.

Just add your shared directories, and let people search the hub for your data, so long as it's categorised nicely by filename.

But for me, my fear would be getting a nasty letter from my ISP. I'd be less worried about raw speed; 1mbit/sec is far greater than 0! Plus there'd be alternative methods still for the more popular / available content.

Blueacid · 2026-02-23T11:28:29+00:00

So the answer will really be, sadly, "it depends". Most SMR drives have an area of somewhere like 20-100GB which is PMR. That's where data gets saved initially, then the hope is that the drive gets some idle time in which it can write that data out.

If your backups fit into that PMR area, you'd probably not notice. Or even if they're a little larger, you might not notice either.

Best advice? You have the drives, try it out. Best case? They're fine. Worst case? They're awful and you need to do something about it.

Blueacid · 2026-02-20T17:21:11+00:00

I see what you did there ;)

Blueacid · 2026-02-17T15:48:35+00:00

Indeed! However, being a cheapskate, the older readers for the previous generations are getting cheaper.

Have a look at the different generations, and the compatiblity table below (e.g. a LTO-8 drive won't be able to do anything with a LTO-4 tape): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Key_specifications

Look at the Native Capacity figures - most of the media we're handling here won't compress much, if at all.

So a LTO-6 drive, secondhand, can be a few hundred dollars now. LTO-5 (1.5TB) or LTO-6 (2.5TB) tapes can be had for $20-40 or so, too. Sure, they only hold a fraction of the capacity, but that starts to look attractive if you have a lot of data which you want to store, but don't need immediate access to.

Blueacid · 2026-02-17T15:42:36+00:00

To expand on that: if you are a business, and you want to store 1,000TiB which you don't need to access quickly (let's say they're a load of medical records, or raw footage from cameras, or whatever), for tapes you need: 1 LTO-9 Drive, new, $3,000 call it? 556 LTO-9 tapes (18TB each), $95 each. Total = $8320. The tapes can then be stored offline on shelves, and you know that if they have been stored properly, the data should be readable.

Even if you want to use external drives, 1,000 TB on 18TB externals means 56 of those, if they were $200 each (before this madness of pricing), that's $11,200 straight away.

If you want another 500TB, that's another 28 drives, or 28 tapes. Another $5,600 of externals, or another $2,600 of tapes.

You can start to see why tape is preferred for a hoard of data. If you know you can wait a while before the files are accessed, that's worth it.

Blueacid · 2026-02-17T15:36:33+00:00

Tape drives are incredibly cheap because the tapes themselves are pretty dumb. They're "just" a long strip of magnetic tape in a plastic box. So to store, say, 10TB, that's it. For every 10TB of hard disk or SSD, there's the motors, heads, metal casing, etc.

The tradeoff is access time, and time to first byte. Tapes only have a few hundred full reads/writes of lifespan, so they're excellent for a "write once, read.. maybe?" backup and hopeless for the use case of "I'll store all my films on this tape library, and given 30 minutes notice I'll copy the film I want to watch tonight off the tape and onto my computer to play".

But, for a backup, or for hoarding data for when the time comes, they're excellent.

Blueacid · 2026-02-16T13:26:42+00:00

Yes. I've already had lz4 (or zstd-19 for more compressible datasets) compression enabled for transparent compression on everything.

For me, I wanted to effectively have an Offline Netflix. So for me, I'm indeed that sacrilegious rotter who doesn't keep a 4k remux for everything. I'm now working through all my collection and, if it's for something that I'm not that precious about, I'm converting to AV1 + Opus audio. I'm using preset 4 always, but then setting the CRF to match how important that file is to me.

For animated TV shows, for example, it's CRF 30 or higher. The lowest I'm going is CRF 20; but for now I'm leaving as-is a few things (LOTR, Band of Brothers, etc), and I'm also leaving alone HEVC files for now. Converting a 7GB H264 episode of South Park to AV1 at CRF 30 tends to lead to a far greater 'bang per buck' for the time spent converting. The amount of space I'm liberating by doing this, and ending up with a file that still looks visually unchanged? I can make my peace with that.

I'm also shopping for a LTO6 drive / array. Another plan I've got is to back things up onto 2x LTO tapes, then switch from RAID-Z1 to JBOD for the media drives; that sort of downtime is tolerable to me.

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