view the rest of the comments
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.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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was so scattered and in some cases I had half my Steam library downloaded onto two or three of the hard drives, all outdated.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.