TLDR: Download your content offline before it gets lost forever.
From now on you should never trust online hosting, I started seeing a lot of piracy sources( Streaming websites, torrent indexes,… Etc) get shut down.
So I highly recommend for all pirates to download anything they want offline to reuse and don’t trust keeping it online, sadly for me, a lot of material had been lost as there is almost no online service or piracy service has it( I am talking about material that is 5-10 years old.).
I know that this is not the first time piracy websites/hosts gets taken down but this time feels different as it became aggressive and I feel that in the next months a considerable amount of content are going to be lost.
People also need to keep seeding torrents. That’s how we can keep stuff alive
Everybody should look into hardlinks and cross-seeding. By today’s standards, it’s painless and very unlikely to ever take up your bandwith
and very unlikely to ever take up your bandwith
Are you sure about that? Not all of us have fiber, you know. For instance, I have like 175 Mbps down, but only like either 2 or 10 Mbps up. (I can’t remember which. Lol.)
In my case, I’m always seeding hundreds of torrents…yet my upload rarely goes above 1 or maaaybe 2 Mbps. Could just be luck, but you can always throttle the speeds if you need to
Torrent clients also have bandwidth limiters built in. So if a user has 5Mbps upload, change it to 1 or 2 on the setting and off you go.
both of them are much too slow to seed usefully
Exactly, which is why I
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Use a VPN server specifically configured for P2P,
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Use port forwarding on said server,
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Only have three torrents active at a time so as not to divide my bandwidth too much, and
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Typically seed for weeks at a time so as to give the ratio time to build at such low speeds. (I typically try to seed up to 10.0x, but you know, with old seeds, that’s not always possible to do even with weeks of seeding. :) )
Seeding in this way may not be very effective, but it makes it at least feasible.
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I’m honestly kind of surprised there aren’t “torrent torrents.” Just distributing a collection of torrents that might be of interest within a given category, say “top 100 movies of 2024.” Once you have the list of torrents locally you are less reliant upon some website hosting them for you.
Great idea. I was very happy to find a top 100 science fiction audiobook collection torrent many years ago
This is one advantage Gnutella had/has over torrents. Kind of like a federated content library. Too bad low quality content and malware were such a huge problem.
I feel like this whole hobby has always existed on the verge of being deleted for whatever reason, and I am forever grateful that there are people who put this stuff up in the first place.
Still need to work out a way for me to help out.
I download to my HDD and anything truly worth of keeping gets burned to a BD-R disc for long term cold storage. HDD is more likely to fail in 10+ years than a BD-R.
Building a NAS is a large upfront cost but it’s worth it IMO. Giant HDDs are fairly cheap now and you can use cool filesystems like Btrfs to combat bit flips from cosmic rays and the like. I’m not sure I’d trust a dye based optical media, but there are apparently some archive quality 100 year BD-R. Most have a drastically shorter lifespan, though.
According to the Canadian Conservation Institute, which publishes a paper on media longevity, BD-R discs are expected to last between 5 and 20 years, depending on the material they are made out of. BD-RE, which is erasable Blu-ray, is estimated for 20 to 50 years while DVD-R and CD-R, which hold a lot less data, can last 50 to 100 years.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pioneer-new-blu-ray-recorder-and-bdr-promise-100-years-lifespan
Building a NAS is a large upfront cost but it’s worth it IMO.
Too much of a hassle. With discs, they can be transported far easier than a NAS + drives and they can be compartmentalized and distributed to other people easier than with a NAS.
I’m not sure I’d trust a dye based optical media, but there are apparently some archive quality 100 year BD-R.
I wouldn’t trust dye-based optical media either. The BD-R discs I use incorporate an inorganic writable layer that’s rated for 100+ year storage under ideal conditions. BD-R discs are WORM (write once, read many times) so they cannot be re-written-- another massive benefit for archival purposes.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pioneer-new-blu-ray-recorder-and-bdr-promise-100-years-lifespan
The author of this article did a very poor job at researching the subject matter. There’s zero mention of things like the difference between HTL vs LTH, or things like Verbatim’s MABL layers. There’s a good reason why one form of preferred media storage archivists use is BD-R. Let’s take the 100+ year ratings with a grain of salt, and assume say… 50 years. The average hard drive can be relied on for about 10 years. You can see where I’m going with this, which is why I’m far more comfortable using BD-R discs with HTL/MABL for long term data storage instead of hard drives which would have to be replaced every 10 years or so.
BD-R discs are expected to last between 5 and 20 years, depending on the material they are made out of. BD-RE, which is erasable Blu-ray, is estimated for 20 to 50 years while DVD-R and CD-R, which hold a lot less data, can last 50 to 100 years.
I’ve seen that Canadian govt link passed around on other forums and I’d remind people of how painfully outdated that info is. Again, no mention of HTL, which is the big factor that significantly improves longevity and reliability. What I’ve always found really bizarre is that they single academic paper that the Canadian govt page relies on in terms of BD-R’s lifespan (Iraci 2018) is hardly adequate. If you read Iraci 2018, you’ll see how it… really isn’t based on good data or testing practices at all. I think the problem is people see a scientific citation and (understandably) assume the info is legit, but in this case scratching the surface reveals an incredibly bad research paper written by an author who appears to have very little past/future experience in that field.
Testing involved the exposure of samples to conditions of 80 °C and 85 % relative humidity for intervals up to 84 days
^ That’s from Iraci 2018. Testing the reliability of a product should involve realistic conditions. I’d ask anyone who supports Iraci’s paper to answer this-- in what kind of remotely plausible situation would you find yourself in where conditions are 80 °C with 85% RH? Further, do you trust a paper that purports these conditions to be suitable when testing the longevity of optical media? To me, this is like testing various panes of glass by throwing them off a high rise building. Iraci’s paper is ridiculous, IMO-- and there’s a good reason why it’s been cited like 2 times in the last 6 years.
Are those the m-disc? I’ve heard they’re no longer using the inorganic layer you’re referring to, but still being sold with the same branding.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_verbatim_no_longer_sells_real_m_discs_now/
For me, it’s just too much risk. I don’t want to have to worry about counterfeit discs or a silent downgrade from the manufacturer. Those inorganic discs are slated to last a long time, but who really knows? A set of HDDs in RAID with a 3-2-1 backup strategy is the gold standard. HDDs do fail, and I’ve already planned for that.
You do point out some good points I didn’t consider before for BD-R, but for me, it’s NAS and sneakernet with flash drives for the homies. Hardly anyone I know has an optical drive anymore, much less a Blu-ray drive in their PC.
This is just Reddit falling for misinformation. That thread has been debunked so many times. There’s a bunch of good YouTube videos covering it but long story short, redditors noticed something odd and immediately assumed it was some huge conspiracy when it wasn’t.
And again, that 2018 paper… I encourage people to read it and see just how silly the methodology was.
Regarding the testing - Short of waiting 100 years, how else would you accelerate the degradation of the discs to simulate aging?
Not totally surprised about Reddit falling for some misunderstood labeling. Just curious about that, mainly.
However, even if they are perfect they still wouldn’t meet my needs. I couldn’t use them to share data with anyone I know, as nobody has a data Blu-ray drive. I can’t access the data on them at a whim, and they’re slower than a RAID array. I can’t easily perform automated routine data scrubbing to ensure corruption hasn’t occurred. Speaking of; how often do you verify the data on your discs, and how do you do it?
I can see its usefulness in some scenarios (cold storage), but I’m quite happy with my NAS.
I’m not sure, but I can say with certainty that increasing temps to 80C with 85% RH isn’t any kind of demonstrable way of accurately predicting longevity under realistic conditions.
If I wanted to safety test a car, it would make sense to run a series of conventional car crashes. It wouldn’t make sense to drive the car off a cliff and then claim that during testing, the car was proven to be unsafe.
I agree with a lot of other points. Personally, I just find it works better in my brain to have all media (TV shows, eBooks, movies, and music) organized on discs. Same goes with personal photos and videos. For certain things, I keep copies on my PC like photos and music, but for other things that I don’t access frequently, I prefer to have them on discs. That said, I do have a HDD backup of everything. I’d love to get another large HDD but just can’t justify the $$$.
I really need to get a BD-R.
The whirring sound alone is worth it. Lovely memories.
To add to this, back that local hardrive up on a REMOVABLE drive, and keep it physically detached. We are all one lightning strike away from near total loss.
or unplug the pc/nas/whatever everytime it’s shut down
Would a surge protector be enough? I’ve never owned one, but I’ve considered putting my PC, router and (in the future) NAS behind both a surge protector and a UPS.
This goes for any content not just piracy sites. Just the other day I seen someone I watch delete half of their videos but luckily I had downloaded everything.
There’s a bunch of stuff from Youtube alone I can’t see again because I didn’t download it when I had the chance…
Youtube has been getting crazy with deletions! If it’s not G rated it’s getting tossed.
12 TB drives are pretty cheap right now.
Just bought a bunch of $75 12TB disks from GoHardDrive’s eBay storefront.
Still running through the diagnostics, but nothing has jumped out yet, 48hrs in. Sure, they’re 4 years old and have over a petabyte of lifetime writes. They also have 5 year warranties.
Aren’t these old and abused disks…?
In a sense. They’re also fancy-pants enterprise drives rated to be able to last over a million hours.
Drive failures follow the old “bathtub curve”. You get the lemons that fail when they’re brand new – that’s one side of the curve. Then for several years, they fail at a consistently low rate. Then once they start getting really old, the failure rate goes up – giving you the other side of the curve.
True, these are probably closer to the “old age” side of the bathtub curve. But GHD is pretty good about honoring their warranty. Back stuff up and you should be fine.
HDD usually don’t have a limited number of writes like SSD do, if they are robust, maybe enterprise units, they can last a long time.
In a home environment some prefer using slower (5400 vs 7200), non-enterprise hard drives, maybe fewer drives with higher capacity, to reduce noise, power consumption and improve cooling (in enterprise settings this stuff is standardized and they don’t care about noise, in my custom pc I might have forgotten to use the vibration dampeners or I mounted the disks vertically…every white box is different).
Also there are big differences between different models and makers. If they’re cheap enough those helium filled enterprise drives can be one of the best options!
This is all true but I’ve seen my fair share of enterprise disks die after a few years of use.
In my case I’m using ZFS so a disk or two of varying types might not be the end of the world. In the 9 years I’ve had my NAS I’ve lost 3 WD RED 3B disks. Kind of surprise at my failure rate tbh
Where? 🤔
Diskprices is great for comparing price per terabyte across different brands.
Got an 18tb from serverpartdeals for 160 I think.
I just buy all my stuff on newegg. Decent 12 TB drives are going for around $250 to $300 right now.
I started seeing a lot of piracy sources( Streaming websites, torrent indexes,… Etc) get shut down.
Been like that for the past 30 years. Or worse, they remain active but kept as a Honeypot.
And upload content as torrents, share the torrent files/magnet links and keep seeding!
We need some sort of historical torrent indexer for lost/dead torrents, a wayback machine for magnet links that gathers/scrapes them automagically from the internet
that’s the pirate bay
deleted by creator
Can someone explain to me why these services were on the clearnet to begin with?
i2p and Tor are really slow + the amount of people who use them are small compared to the clearnet and also a lot of those websites have ads on their website which would not work on i2p or Tor , so it does not make any sense to host it there.
I guess z-library needs to make a template on how to get a setup like theirs working. Unlimited subdomains lmao
Ads work on .onion. I’d never click one, but you can show a banner no problem.
Thanks for reminding me. Yeah I need to backup my ROM library of old games. Got most of them from Vimm’s lair earlier this year. They had to take down a lot of the games shortly after cause threats of law suit from Nintendo, Sega among others. It’s just absurd many of the games on there are not even available legally anymore.
I’ve been maxxing out ram on my pi 3b OMV/docker server and was looking at getting a pi 5 to replace it. Are there any good guides for setting up that *arr stuff I see out and about?
Also open to other hardware alternatives to upgrade from a pi. I saw a lot of n100 hype but I just don’t expect it to be the miracle worker some people claim it to be lol
