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!

  • rako@tarte.nuage-libre.frFrançais
    5·
    8 hours ago

    This is exactly what git-annex was built for:

    https://git-annex.branchable.com/

    use case: The Archivist

    Bob has many drives to archive his data, most of them kept offline, in a safe place.

    With git-annex, Bob has a single directory tree that includes all his files, even if their content is being stored offline. He can reorganize his files using that tree, committing new versions to git, without worry about accidentally deleting anything.

    When Bob needs access to some files, git-annex can tell him which drive(s) they’re on, and easily make them available. Indeed, every drive knows what is on every other drive.