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? 😁

  • drkt@scribe.disroot.orgEnglish
    21·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Well, okay, you’re talking “end of the free and open Internet” which, yeah, would be a pretty big and terrible deal, and I really hope people and institutions that are able, are archiving such important things! (I should see how big that Wikipedia archive is for kicks lol). But yeah, we’d have much bigger problems.

      We gotta support archive.org and our libraries for this reason! I would hate to be without them.

      I personally wasn’t talking about digital “prepping” so much as I was talking about motivations for hoarding data of things we’re interested in. Our media becoming lost media because wealthy interests don’t give a crap or, worse, decided to censor it.

      Not everyone is just hoarding Sailor Moon episodes; people have tons of books and manuals too just because it interests them. Lots of people preserve video game ROMs as well, which has thankfully kept those works from disappearing entirely.

      Moving that information would become significantly more difficult without a free and open Internet, but that’s a different “threat model” worth its own conversation, I think.

      For what you’re talking about. I bet you’d be interested in someone like Marion Stokes , for instance, who “data hoarded” tons of recordings of television news, and that archive actually proved useful to historians way later.

      Thanks for your thoughtful comment and perspective. :)

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      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. 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”.

      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.