Comment by LeoPanthera

Comment by LeoPanthera 11 days ago

I have an interest in historical television, and YouTube has become the default location for other collectors to upload rips of VHS tapes and other formats of captured broadcasts.

So a few years ago I started up a server that slowly (so as not to annoy any YouTube rate limits) downloaded copies of every video from channels I enjoy. I also threw in a few "normal" YouTube channels that I just happen to like.

Today it's archived over 7500 videos and it's still rolling along.

icpmacdo 11 days ago

Can you link some of the best youtube channels for those?

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LeoPanthera 10 days ago

Here's a few vaguely topical ones for Hacker News.
BBC Archive: https://www.youtube.com/@BBCArchive
AT&T Archives: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9
BBC Computer Literacy Project (UK only?): https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk
The Computer Chronicles: https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles
Blue OS Museum: https://www.youtube.com/@BlueOSMuseum

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musha68k 10 days ago

It's amazing how much cheaper spinning disks have gotten over the years. We should all be archiving more IMO.

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leptons 10 days ago

Spinning disks are kind of expensive. I'm paying about $3.00/TB for LTO5 tape. The cheapest refurb hard drives are still about $15/TB.

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- cbozeman 10 days ago
  
  I usually buy from ServerPartDeals and goHardDrive. I missed out on a really great refurb sale of 12TB Seagate drives that were $74.99 each, but even now, you can find 12TB disks for $89.99.
  My only problem with LTO5 tapes is the amount required to do backup. Were I going to do LTO, I'd have to go with LTO9 since they hold 18/45TB and are around $90 a tape.
  
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  leptons 10 days ago
  
  $74.99 for 12TB is still twice as expensive as the LTO 5 tapes I'm getting on ebay. The LTO drive was pretty cheap too, so I'm still way ahead in my 200TB archive with regards to price. The other thing I like about tape is that is has a physical write-protect notch, so if my systems were infected with some ransomware, it wouldn't be able to touch my tapes even if I have a tape in the drive. Plug a hard drive in and you could be instantly fucked by the ransomware.
  
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- musha68k 10 days ago
  
  Of course tape can't be beat, always great for offline / offsite archival. I was talking about more ergonomic online archiving without including tape robots ;) Even if price per spinning TB didn't fall much since the pandemic started - IIRC I couldn't have bought a 20TB prosumer disk new for ~$300 then.
  
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- mathgeek 10 days ago
  
  It's great that both are relatively cheap as they both have their advantages and use cases. Mostly depends on how "hot" your archives need to be.
  
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  leptons 10 days ago
  
  For "Hot" backup I have two mirrored RAID 10 systems (one in a detached garage, so technically "off site"), so I could lose up to 4 drives without losing any data. That's where the cheap hard drive storage comes in handy. One of those systems runs 24/7, so I pay a premium for spinning disks because availability is what that's all about. The "off site" system kind of a cold-storage backup system with the LTO tape drive in it. That system does weekly backups, and it also acts like a buffer for all the less "hot" data that mostly goes almost straight to tape until it's needed again.
  I waited for years for used datacenter tape drives to become affordable. The math for DVD or hard drive cold storage didn't make sense, especially since I like redundant backups so it's 2x the cost. Tapes were designed for cold storage and it's faster and more cost effective than backing up to hard drives. Maybe I'll change my tune someday after a tape unravelling disaster if that ever happens, but in 2 years it's been pretty reliable.
  
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- shiroiushi 9 days ago
  
  >The cheapest refurb hard drives are still about $15/TB.
  Huh? I just bought some 10TB refurb drives from Amazon for $60 each.
  
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  leptons 9 days ago
  
  Still twice as expensive per TB as the LTO 5 tapes I'm getting on ebay.
  
  Reply View | 4 replies