datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
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Storage is dirt cheap. Just add more. IT at work bugs out their eyes when I talk about adding more storage space. I have more at home than they do in the office. Lol.
I’ve been buying used 8TB HGST drives from eBay. Dirt cheap and haven’t had one fail yet.
I’ve always been one for moderation. Plus, the big issue was just being able to find all of it. Everything was so scattered and in some cases I had half my Steam library downloaded onto two or three of the hard drives, all outdated.
Now I know where it all is and can easily back it up, where before I only had one copy of a lot of my most important files.
I’m a big advocate of unraid servers. Mix And match any size of drives you have available into a single large NAS with protection against drive failures. You can use old pc hardware you might have lying around. It’s commercial software but you can demo it for free. It’s good enough that I own two full pro licenses.
This is actually what lead me to set up a software RAID - my family is primarily Windows and I didn't want to remember if the files were on D:, F:, G:, K:, etc. I'd rather have a root folder that's extendable.