September 4, 2026

Uncommon Ephemera Partners with QNAP to Move the Filmstrip Archive onto Rack-Mount Storage

A QNAP NAS now hosts the archive's databases, websites and services; QNAP is featuring the migration as a customer story

JOHNSON CITY, NY - September 4, 2026 - Uncommon Ephemera has partnered with QNAP Systems, Inc. to move the infrastructure behind its filmstrip preservation work onto much-needed new hardware. QNAP provided a TS-855eU-8G rack-mount network-attached storage unit which, since June 2026, has served as the primary host for the organization, running project management and filmstrip databases, public websites for Uncommon Ephemera and The Internet Filmstrip Database, a custom administrative interface, and a custom social media scheduler. In return, Uncommon Ephemera founder Mark O'Brien documented the migration in a video, a written case study and photographs, and on September 4 QNAP USA began their promotional collaboration with O'Brien, publishing a portion of that video across its Instagram, Facebook and X channels, with a permanent page in their website's "Customer Stories" section with the full video and case study launching in a few weeks.

The partnership addressed a problem that had been building for years. The archive's previous server was bought in 2023 as a file store for scans and backups. As donations slowed and paid hosting was pulled in-house to cut costs, that same server ended up running a full production stack it was never sized for, and its CPU and network capabilities became the bottleneck. O'Brien first investigated what options were available from that server's manufacturer, and was shocked to discover there was no product refresh at that price point. The TS-855eU's eight-core Intel Atom C5125 roughly doubles the available compute, and its native support for Docker Compose removed friction from the day-to-day management of the many custom services the project depends on.

O'Brien migrated the services himself over approximately two weeks in June, one at a time, being careful to maximize uptime and the safety of the unique data. The unit now runs a 30-terabyte RAID 6 storage pool with NVMe cache, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and a direct 10-gigabit link for desktop work on large files in addition to its standard 2.5-gigabit links to the rest of his network. Off-site copies of the archive continue to be backed up to three other locations regularly.

"There are no museums, institutions, universities, or nonprofits that are saving these, so I'm working independently," O'Brien says in the video. "and that cuts me off from a ton of funding, a lot of networking, and support in general." From his home office in upstate New York, O'Brien says the few companies willing to endorse public-good projects are a lifeline whose importance many people outside of his world don't consider: "I've reached out to companies like BlackMagic Design, LaserGraphics, and Synology asking for help safeguarding these forgotten cultural artifacts, and they all find a way to decline. But I reached out to QNAP and they said, 'how can we help?'"

"What happens to the media we leave behind?" QNAP USA wrote in the post. "Mark O'Brien of Uncommon Ephemera is preserving a piece of history most people have forgotten: vintage filmstrips. With 1,300+ filmstrips already digitized and thousands more waiting, Mark needed infrastructure that could grow with the archive."

The added capacity matters because the archive is still growing. Almost 5,000 filmstrips are now cataloged, the only surviving record of its kind, of which roughly 1,800 have been digitally scanned at high resolution, leaving thousands more awaiting digitization. Every scanned item is published for free on the Internet Archive, with select titles being fully restored into videos simulating what they would have looked like when originally presented on the appropriate equipment.

About Uncommon Ephemera

Uncommon Ephemera is a media preservation initiative focused on saving American educational and industrial filmstrips. All preserved materials are made freely available through the Internet Archive, and a growing comprehensive collection of information about the titles released on the format is being built at its sister project The Internet Filmstrip Database. For more information, visit uncommonephemera.org.

Links:

Media Contact:

Mark O'Brien
[email protected]