Based on other similar recordings I made, I estimate it at 4GiB.
It was a baseband recording of APT+DSB from the NOAA-15 satellite from when it had AVHRR scan motor issues. Not that rare for NOAA-15 (xD), but now that the satellite has been decommissioned, I’ll never record it again.
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/messages/2025/08/MSG_20250820_1410.html
I do have baseband recordings from good NOAA-15 and 18 passes, but still, this one would have been special.
I’ve posted about it when the issue was occuring: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/3035683
Alternative link: https://lemmy.world/post/4162384 (preferred - our instance is slow - trying without cache a few hours ago, loading main page took 2 minutes and 12 seconds excluding loading of thumbnails)
I’ve just been looking into this again yesterday, and remembered that at some point I had a recording of this partial failure, but it seems I permanently deleted it. The last place it could have been, a HDD from my old laptop, I wiped 2 months ago (incl. full overwrite).
At least I still have the demodulated audio of the APT signal from that partial failure - keep in mind this was still analog - NOAA-15 launched in 1998.
Perhaps not the usual file with sentimental value, like picture or video, but I am a bit weird. I can never record it again. Fuck, I need to start archiving everything.
Now I feel like BBC, erasing TV shows to re-use the tapes.
Or perhaps more aptly (pun intended), NASA re-using Apollo 11 landing imagery tapes.
Oh, guess where I had the 2 remaining recordings. On the cheapest unbranded DVDs I bought on sale in Kaufland at 10 cents / disc, which seem to corrupt after 4 years and can split apart easily with fingers.
My problem is that I’m the kind of datahoarder who collects a whole bunch of random useless things that I never need ever again, so I don’t know how to differentiate the trash from the important stuff
Hard drives are cheap.
Mechanical drives are cheap. Mechanical drives can fail.
Ok, and? How does this help OP?
Just leaving this here in case people are interested!:
deleted by creator
Back in the day 20+ years ago my family decided to own a business class blade server, not a whole server, just one blade, to back up and store our family videos and photos that had been scanned. Due to the cost of the single blade even second hand my father didn’t have good opsec for backups. Lo and behold a year or so the blade failed and my father and I spent the better part of a week defragging and recovering photos. We lost gigabytes of photos and spent another week+ rescanning what was still scannable. So 20 years down the road I have my own sever in rai 5, a cold storage backup, and a cloud storage backup just in case.
What are you using for cold storage? I need to get on that for my family photo NAS
As another said M-discs are a great way to move data to a more permanent solution that is only writable. Alternatively making a copy of data you know won’t change very much or at all and have those files copied to a solid state drive. Those will last a lot longer on a shelf than hdd drives with discs that spin. Preferably you’d also want to make sure your cold storage is low humidity and temp controlled. If you can’t control both lean on controlling the temp and keep it regular, mid 50’s °F would probably work.
You can vacuum seal the drive to negate the humidity concerns.
I did not consider that. I’ll have to revisit my setup to see what I can do to include vacuum seal as an added step.
Not OP but I personally use Blu-ray M-DISCs (advertised as having multi-hundred year lifespans, they get data physically etched into them) for cold storage.
