this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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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!

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[–] Mopplikus@feddit.org 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

High res image sadly, otherwise I would go the Jellyfin route

[–] aksdb@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I heavily use Immich for images and am very happy. Since you can specify custom storage locations it might be worth a shot adding your external storage, let it index everything and then test how it behaves when the external storage is offline. Maybe it keeps thumbnails separate too then you could even browse the library visually and you would only run into errors once you try to open an image.

[–] needanke@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago

I had an issue setting up immich for my parents, whre the fs would stall too long for it to successfully get files. Missing media was just getting displayed as a grey box with a "missing media" text on them.