Edit: To be clear, I agree with you in general. I just got bugged a bit by those three things 😅

You do not. You are misinformed and propagandized. Your choice of examples revealed that clearly and nothing you say can refute that fact. Read Marx, read Lenin, your understanding of the state is lacking.

For one, anyone educated would understand that Americans are the best example of sheep in the world and that many Europeans are good second examples. The British for example with their high tolerance for a surveillance, laws that criminalize all manners of small trivialities, etc, etc. Educate yourself.

“We have to comply with the law”. This has become Russia or China where the sheep people do whatever an oligarchy dictate.

“What are we a bunch of Asians?”

Also China isn’t run by an “oligarchy” but by a dictatorship of the communist party via a mandate of the masses (they execute CEOs and rich people there, we let them rape kids and commit horrific crimes of greed and fine them less than they made off that crime). Russia is but so is the west and I prefer the term capitalists or if you prefer the original French “bourgeoisie”.

There was a study from one of the big ivy league universities that showed that in the US the people don’t get what they want, popular policy is consistently not passed nor popular will acted on. Princeton I think.

So it’s not what people per se want, it’s what the ruling class (capitalists in the west) wants. And they’ve decided that because the rate of profit falls and their demand for profit grows that they need to put the population under lock and key because they’ve made economic conditions worse and they’re going to get worse yet. They need a police state to control the workers who might want better conditions or gasp to take some or all of their wealth. This is part of that.

This is also because China is rising and they are terrified of people seeing a more equal, just society that can be created through socialism. They are terrified of dissenting voices so they want to remove anonymity so they can terrorize dissidents and opponents into silence. They saw what happened with their attempts at narrative shaping in Gaza, they are deeply alarmed that tik tok won’t be the last thing, a new one could pop up anywhere, right now they play whack a mole, they want to control the whole thing top to bottom.

As to people being sheep. It’s more like they’re beaten down. You defeat this today they come back in a year and then again and again. They have all the money, all the time and are willing to wear people down, use their capitalist owned media to propagandize and sensationalize for this until the people are exhausted and stop fighting it so hard. People work long hours, they take home less money than ever, the government openly abuses people, the police don’t act fairly and persecute black people, there’s a sense of there being no fairness and not enough time. The people are also mis-educated. They’re led to believe there’s this big problem, they don’t understand technology and passively accept their leadership has some amount of good will in how they pass laws and govern to address real problems the bourgeois press has done its job of propagandizing them for. They can’t see the whole picture because of these facts.

You can buy an all in one “wireless router” or buy a wired router and connect to that a wireless access point.

All that would happen absolute worst case scenario if MS breaks this is your users would get a whining complaint about not being activated. Get a small “Activate Windows” logo stuck in the lower right hand of their screen and would lose the ability to change wallpapers, customize windows colors, etc.

To be clear it wouldn’t break the install and it would leave it in a state in which you could use an updated version of MAS (reminder MAS supports multiple activation options) to fix it remotely.

If you’re going intel you can check the ark.intel pages for the processors in the devices you’re looking at. Intel does pretty good documentation so it’ll show you what integrated graphics they have and all that.

Ideally you want a chip that can do hardware decoding (and if possible encoding if you’re serving media to others and intend for it to transcode and not direct-play) of common codecs so you’re not eating a massive power bill or generating tons of heat or getting bogged down in resource utilization.

AV1 support is the only tricky part when it comes to hardware decode support. Maybe you don’t use it yourself but typically only the newer chips support hardware decode of AV1 files. Something to consider if that’s likely to be an issue for you if you have or plan to have lots of AV1 encoded files. (Though there is software decode of course)

The Intel N150 can do a 4K desktop, you won’t be doing 4k gaming on it at all but it can do the desktop and video playback and is a low power consumption chipset. Should be able to support at least 2-3 4k transcodes as well. A lot of enthusiasts use it for just this purpose in fact and it’s fairly snappy for uses like these.

Anything more powerful than an N150 will be fine as well for 4K video viewing, transcoding, 4k desktop, etc. So if you want to spend more and get a more powerful Intel chip you can. Just avoid 13/14th generation i series (i5/i7/i9) especially used because of the hardware damage bad design did to those and there are a lot of messed up ones floating around from people trying to offload.

144hz may be the really tricky part. Lots of these mini boxes are capped at 60hz so definitely double-check that. There’s always the option of displayport to HDMI cables too if it has a DP output that supports the necessary 4k framerate. N150 might struggle driving that to be honest.

Oh and be aware of thermal throttling. Lots of manufacturers stuff Ultra 9 series in things like laptops and minis with inadequate cooling and they thermal throttle like crazy so you pay $800 and get something with the same performance as a properly cooled Ultra 7 or 5 series.

To loop back around to whether you need a dedicated GPU. You have to ask yourself are you transcoding streams for others or is it mostly direct-play without transcode? Integrated GPU on the CPU die should be good enough unless you have an awful lot of streams going at once or some other pressing need.

You can run whatever distro you want. There are extremely specialized distros like OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) which is basically kind of like Kodi running on Debian but without a desktop environment (extremely media center focused).

If the drive previously wasn’t making this noise (as in it had been filled with data, been in use for days-weeks and wasn’t ever making this noise) and it doesn’t happen in response to data writes (even hours after the fact) then it might be a cause for concern that the drive could be dying.

In general it’s a good idea to have back-ups of any important data but I’d really ensure that’s the case here and assume it could imminently fail. In general the sound of hard drives changing (that is sounding different in either idle noises or active writing/reading noises) is a cause for concern for potential drive failure though it could be other things and as drives age they can sometimes change sound signatures as mechanical components age without necessarily failing (could go on working fine for years).

That said there are normal processes in drives that can make noise:

• Some sort of operation driven by your OS itself, I won’t begin to get into all of them but there could be something accessing things in the background, doing file table or journaling operations, writes, checks, etc on the file system itself, just low level maintenance stuff.

• SMR drives may continue to write and shuffle data for quite some time after being written to, especially if it was a large amount of data. Though this should still even in the case of multiple terabytes probably be resolved within 12 hours.

• Many drives, especially high capacity enterprise drives do make a -soft- clicking sound as a result of the arms sweeping the surface when idle but not off to if I recall correctly spread around lubricant or some sort of basic mechanical maintenance. It’s part of the normal drive operations. It’s possible it occurs more frequently in response to a massive amount of writes previously like filling a drive or may not be activated until a certain amount of data is written, I’m not really sure how that works as that would probably be proprietary information to the manufacturer.

Should I be worried about this? To my paranoid mind it feels like something is slowly reading my files with some exploit to bypass the indicator light to fly under the radar.

How would it do this? Is it installing hacked firmware to your enclosure too? I doubt you’re that valuable of a target.

If you’re worried about malware then back up your stuff, nuke the install and reinstall from scratch. I wouldn’t worry about it if this is the only thing you’re seeing and find it unlikely.

I would say there are not any worth recommending and that best practices are avoiding running random scripts you don’t understand, keeping software up to date with package managers, and using virtualization tools. Also look into Portmaster perhaps which is an interactive firewall.

Perhaps contained evidence against the former PM who tried to do a military coup and this is the way of getting rid of it? Perhaps protecting co-conspirators if not the top guy.

I think the home media collector usecase is actually a complete outlier in terms of what these formats are actually being developed for.

Well yeah given who makes it but it’s what I care about. I couldn’t care less about obscure and academic efforts (or the profits of some evil tech companies) except as vague curiosities. HEVC wasn’t designed with people like me in mind either yet it means I can have oh 30% more stuff for the same space usage and the enccoders are mature enough that the difference in encode time between it and AVC is negligible on a decently powered server.

Transparency (or great visual fidelity period) also isn’t likely the top concern here because development is driven by companies that want to save money on bandwidth and perhaps on CDN storage.

Which I think is a shame. Lower bitrates for transparency -should- be the goal. The goal should be to get streaming content to consumers at a very high quality, ideally close to or equivalent to UHD BluRay for 4k. Instead we get companies that bit-starve and hop onto these new encoders because they can use fewer bits as long as they use plenty of tricks to maintain a certain baseline of perceptual visual image quality that passes the sniff test for your average viewer so instead of getting quality bumps we just get them using less bits and passing the savings onto themselves with little meaningful upgrade in visual fidelity for the viewer. Which is why it’s hard to care at all really about a lot of this stuff if it doesn’t benefit the user in any way really.

And which will be so resource intensive to encode with compared to existing standards that it’ll probably take 14 years before home media collectors (or yar har types) are able and willing to use it over HEVC and AV1. :\

As an example AV1 encodes to this day are extremely rare in the p2p scene. Most groups still work with h264 or h265 even those focusing specifically on reducing sizes while maintaining quality. By contrast HEVC had significant uptake within 3-4 years of its release in the p2p scene (we’re on year 7 for AV1).

These greedy, race to the bottom device-makers are still fighting AV1. With people keeping devices longer and not upgrading as much as well as tons of people relying on under-powered smart-TVs for watching (forcing streaming services to maintain older codecs like h264/h265 to keep those customers) means it’s going to take a depressingly long time to be anything but a web streaming phenomenon I fear.

Make a version of Office that works on Linux natively.

Probably the best choice if OP is dreading 11. Put it off, hope that in 3 years Linux support has matured even more for their use cases.

MS support has used this software themselves in an edge case where they couldn’t get Windows to active properly.

You have two options here:

1. Enable the extended support (no pay needed with this software but if OP absolutely refuses to run it they can pay Microsoft money directly though it takes work to find where to do that at) and run on that for 3 years until 2028.

2. Upgrade to LTSC IOT using the method they outline at the link there. Again they have two options, one is free, the other is following that guide but paying for a gray-market key (G2a for instance) for LTSC IOT which would avoid running this software on their PC but would mean paying someone some money for a corporate volume key they’re not technically allowed to sell. Which means support until 2032.

Kids whose schools set up their chrome books inadequately and who found a way around the strict controls to watch porn.

The only thing I would note is -IF- your volumes are not partition or disk based BUT -files- based there is the possibility that corruption of the host file system of the disk the files containing the volumes are on could result in pieces of those files being marked unreadable by the disk and it’s POSSIBLE one way to solve this would be a file system check utility.

HOWEVER such activities carry a -large- risk of data loss so I would advise a bit for bit copy of the disk and doing the repair on that so if it goes wrong you’re not worse off. -IF- you cannot make a copy then I would advise at least trying to mount using backup headers before doing that and copying off anything you can salvage as file system checks can really mess up data recovery and should only be used in certain circumstances.

You’re much better off trying the recovery software I linked in fact than doing a file system check as it will tend to have better results.

You can also use the option to mount as read only in VC to prevent writes to a suspected failing disk.

Let me know if you need further advice.

Veracrypt has back-up headers located elsewhere in the volume that are unlikely to have been overwritten.

First thing’s first I would strongly recommend copying the drive as it currently exists bit for bit to another drive of equal or larger size. Don’t work on the original if you can help it.

Now with this copy, you should try to check the option to use the backup header when mounting and try again. If the partition is gone and veracrypt doesn’t see it you’ll need to try using something that recovers partitions and doesn’t mind encrypted partitions or partitions or file system types it doesn’t understand and use that to ON THE COPY recover and recreate the partition (this will write data and can cause the possibility of further loss or worsen your ability to recover which is why it is important to perform it on a copy). Testdesk may work for this but there are other options that probably are better.

See this list: https://old.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/wiki/software and choose something from there if this data is truly important. Again only work on a copy on another drive. Some of these software examples actually work against the original drive and make a copy elsewhere and should be safe to use on the original drive so long as they have you select a target drive to push the recovered data to but read the documentation. Testdisk absolutely must be used on a copy.

You will incur data loss and likely should run one of the file recovery software mentioned on the drive once successfully mounted in veracrypt to attempt to recover as much as possible.

Use secure erase function which is built into the SATA and other specs, it applies a voltage spike to clear the cells of all held charges thus wiping them. This happens near instantly, it’ll be a process that will signal it’s finished within a minute and takes much less time than that.

If you want to be extra paranoid I suppose you could follow that up by encrypting the entire (empty) drive and then doing it again though I’m not sure this has any benefit however it’s the closest to forcing the cells to be used again and then cleared again. However this does not guarantee that exhausted and worn out areas are flash are not potentially spared both. It’s unlikely for large amounts of data to be recovered from this unless your drive is failing or has been completely worn out but it’s also why if you ever store sensitive data on an SSD it’s preferable to do so in an encrypted form (such as encrypting the whole disk or partition).

This only happens on OEM installs of Windows. Ridiculous but as far as I know if you disable it after first setup (OOBE) it never shows up again if you have only local accounts.

Yes, absolutely. And they can drag Canonical into it as well if they wish though it’s harder. Being UK based doesn’t protect them from the long arm of US law including arresting any US personnel, freezing and seizing their funds, putting out arrest warrants for and harassing those in the UK with the fear of arrest and rendition to the US if they go to a third country (for a conference, vacation, etc, most would buckle rather than live under that). Additionally the US could sanction them for non-cooperation by making it illegal for US companies to sell them products and services, for US citizens to work for or aid them, etc.

They can go after community led projects too, just send the feds over to the houses of some senior US developers and threaten and intimidate them, intimate their imminent arrest and prison sentence unless they stop contact and work with parties from whatever countries the US wishes to choose to name. Raid their houses, seize their electronics, detain them for hours in poor conditions. Lots of ways to apply pressure that doesn’t even have to stand up to extensive legal scrutiny (they can keep devices and things and the people would have to sue to get them back).

The code itself is likely to exist in multiple places so if someone wanted to fork from say next week’s builds for an EU build they could and there would be little the US could do to stop that but they could stop cooperation and force these developers to apply technical measures to attempt to prevent downloads from IP addresses known to belong to sanctioned countries of their choosing.

It’s not like the US can slam the door and take its Linux home and China and the EU and Russia are left with nothing, they’d still have old builds and code and could develop off of those though with broken international cooperation it would be a fragmented process prone to various teething issues.

If you’re just backing up and not serving this data just get 2-3 4TB drives (new, recertified, or used) and an external dock and test the drive then back it up then test again and check SMART both times. Place one drive with a relative or trusted friend. Connect and power up each of the drives at least once annually, refresh the data with anything new at that time and check the smart stats, consider running at least a quick SMART test to ensure none are mechanically failing then back to being unplugged. Really every 3-6 months would be ideal to power on and check SMART but I wouldn’t pester a relative that often for the external one, 1-2 times a year should be fine for that.

This strategy protects you from cryptolocker malware by not leaving any of them live and accessible.

• What’s the cheapest and most flexible NAS I can make from eBay or local? What kind of processors and what motherboard features?

Cheapest or most flexible, choose one. If you want absolute cheapest but not that flexible you can buy a used office PC, a Thinkcenter or Dell optiplex are the most reliable ones though depending on the model they may accommodate anywhere from 1 to if you’re lucky 4 (though commonly only 2) drives via that many SATA ports (often half the SATA ports are 1.0/2.0 for DVD drives so you may not get full speed). Finding space inside them for more than 1 drive could also be a problem depending on form factor but mid-tower models often have room for 2 with space for a third lying on the case itself if you really want to push it.

Most flexible I suppose someone else’s old NAS build, a used case with room for at least 4 3.5" drives gives you a little room to expand.

• What separate guides should I follow to source the drives? What RAID?

You don’t need RAID, it’s not a back-up solution, RAID is for high data availability and integrity. If you really want to you can set-up a RAID 1 I suppose though know this means you’d require at minimum 4 disks for your data and one copy and 6 disks for two copies.

As to sourcing the drives, there are various companies, server parts deals is one that’s well known and decent though their presently available sizes may be larger than what you’re after. No matter whether the drive is brand new, recertified or bought used on ebay the recommendation is test, test, test. Even new drives can be bad. Run a full SMART test at least once, check the SMART data and make sure there are no failure indicators. If you want to be really thorough I’d suggest checking the SMART data when you get it, noting anything concerning, running an extended/full SMART test then after that finishes formatting the drive but unchecking quick format and doing a slower format option that writes zeros across the drive, then filling with your data, then doing another full/extended SMART test and again checking the SMART values before putting it away. Re-test and check SMART at least annually if you’re keeping the drives cold.

• What backup style should I follow? How many cold copies? How do I even handle the event of a fire?

At least two copies, ideally three, at least one copy off-site for things such as fire. If you don’t have a relative, friend, or workplace where you can stash an off-site copy your option would be basically cloud storage back-up which for 4TB wouldn’t be too costly (backblaze personal would allow this much IF you keep one copy connected to a computer that has their app and is turned on at least monthly and they’re $100 a year though note they will delete your data if you go more than 30 rolling days without syncing so if there is a disaster you have a limited time to either get another drive and download it again or contact them and pay to have a copy shipped to you before it’s deleted).

You could also I suppose invest in a fireproof safe though that doesn’t protect against burglary where they steal your safe thinking it has valuables in it. You really need a copy off-site. Other options would be a bank safe deposit box though probably more costly.

One way to get friends to help is to buy more storage space than you need, say two 8TB drives and you offer to back-up a copy of their stuff at your house so you have a copy of their stuff+yours at your house and they have the same copy at theirs. Though you could also use separate drives.

Most are redundant video files that are in old encodings or not encoded at all

All re-encoding unless it’s from lossless to lossless induces degradation. For archival purposes I’d suggest against re-encoding unless it’s to another lossless format or unless they’re in a lossless format or very high bitrate (>20MBps video for SD or 1080p HD) and you’re keeping a high bitrate in the new encoding. Also avoid hardware encoding, it’s faster but introduces more degradation and is less precise than software encoding. Removing duplicates is another matter.

MakeMKV can rip the DVDs without touching the contents. I’d suggest either an ISO or more helpfully the contents in folder layout which should be preserved under a top level folder with the name of the disc and at the bottom level .vob files.

You certainly can use Handbrake but it is re-encoding and if you have no experience it’s easy to mess up (among other things de-interlacing doesn’t always work right without tweaking so it’s typically best for archiving to not re-encode DVDs before sharing).

-If- you do chose to use Handbrake (again I wouldn’t recommend it if archiving, it takes skill and there’s a reason why to this day full DVD rips are useful to people who want a copy while someone’s best attempt at an AVI file made 15 years ago looks awful and is considered useless given the low bitrates and old codecs) I’d plead you use software not hardware encoding, choose x264 or x265 (10bit for x265) and use the slow preset at CRF, constant quality 16 and make sure de-interlacing is set right on auto, also pass through the audio in original dolby digital as well as vobsub subtitles. But it really is best to not encode and just copy.

You can share directly to the DHT swarms by just creating your own torrent and eventually people will find it assuming it’s named correctly in the format of <movie name (year)>.

Don’t duplicate other people’s work if you can help it. There are various sites for sharing this type of stuff, I don’t want to get in trouble so won’t name the one but there is one listed in the piracy community megathread, a Russian one, semi-private. I would search disc titles first to make sure what you’re doing doesn’t already exist and focus on archiving and sharing original non-re-encoded copies of those which don’t presently exist elsewhere.