Hello everyone, I’m in the process of setting up long term storage of a large amount of media files for my family. Since this is stuff that’s rarely accessed, I don’t need it to be always fully available, and I want to limit the actual transfer of files to a specific schedule.

Since knowing what’s already in storage is kinda non-trivial, are there any tools out there that allow me to browse which files are in cold storage, without the actual drives being attached / mounted? So only info like file location, name, metadata, perhaps icon, etc.

The transfer part I can manage to automate, as I can think of a few ways of allowing my users to “stage” pulling and pushing info from and to cold storage, and having the transfers be done on a fixed schedule like every two weeks or something.

Obviously self-hosted, open source stuff that’s not vibecoded is preferred.

Thanks in advance!

  • Azura The Spellkissed@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    13 hours ago

    Not a GUI/webapp, but I like to use ncdu snapshots (“exports”). ncdu is an interactive file browser / disk usage analyzer with a terminal UI, which allow for convenient browsing but also, y’know, figuring out what to delete in case of storage cleanups.

    creating a snapshot (“exporting”):
    ncdu /pathyouwanttoscan -2 --one-file-system --compress -o snapshot_ncdu.json.zstd

    (-2 enables progress bar and error messages during the scan)

    reading (“importing”):
    ncdu -f snapshot_ncdu.json.zstd