I have a bunch of old VHS tapes that I want to digitize. I have never digitized VHS tapes before. I picked up a generic HDMI capture card, and a generic composite to HDMI converter. Using both of those, I was planning on hooking a VCR up to a computer running OBS. Overall, I'm rather ignorant of the process. The main questions that I currently have are as follows:

• What are the best practices for reducing the risk of damaging the tapes?
• Are there any good steps to take to maximize video quality?
• Is a TBC required (can it be done in software after digitization)?
• Should I clean the VCR after every tape?
• Should I clean every tape before digitization?
• Should I have a separate VCR for the specific purpose of cleaning tapes?

Please let me know if you have any extra advice or recommendations at all beyond what I have mentioned. Any information at all is a big help.

Hey folks, I'm lucky enough to be in one of the few places on the internet that uses LTO.

I'm running LTO-8 tape. My current drive is kind of a dud, I'm interested in a new (to me) drive. Either internal in just an old desktop, or an external drive. I'm not afraid to shell out for it, but if I am I'm nervous to drop 2000 on just a random ebay seller. Anyone have any reputable sources? In the Seattle area if anyone knows a local one too.

Years ago I came across filecoin/sia decentralized data storage and I started trying them but then I stopped due to lack of time. Some days ago I've heard in a podcast about a kind of NAS that does kinda the same thing: it spreads chunks of data across other devices owned by other users.

Is there a service that does this but with your own hardware or, even better, something open source where you can have X GB as far as you share the same amount of space plus something extra?

It would be great for backup.

I'm entertaining the thought to write my backups onto tape storage. So my questiont to this community is: does someone know where (if any) to get cheap and simple (my requirements are "just writes & reads the data and is usable with a Linux machine") used tape drives?

Thanks for any hints.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a more efficient way to save and archive Lemmy comments and posts on my Android phone.
Currently, when I come across a comment I want to keep for future reference, I manually copy the text and link, then paste it into a note in my Obsidian vault. If there's an image or other media in the original post, I save and include that as well.

However, this process feels a bit cumbersome. Ideally, I’d like a way to quickly save or share a comment or post URL and automatically archive the top 20 or so comment chains, along with the original post, including any images, videos, or articles.

Has anyone found a streamlined method for doing this? I often find that by the time I return to check the responses or review the content, the post or article has disappeared. Any tips or tools that could help simplify this process would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26278528

I'm running my media server with a 36tb raid5 array with 3 disks, so I do have some resilience to drives failing. But currently can only afford to loose a single drive at a time, which got me thinking about backups. Normally I'd just do a backup to my NAS, but that quickly gets ridiculous for me with the size of my library, which is significantly larger than my NAS storage of only a few tb. And buying cloud storage is much too expensive for my liking with these amounts of storage.

Do you backup only the most valuable parts of your library?