Just have a few good practices and you should really only have to buy harddrives when they fail. I have drives that are from 2008 that I only turn on when I want to go down memory lane.

Have a few copies of your data. Original, backup, offsite backup.

Backups have parity or redundancy so if a drive fails you can replace it without completely rebuilding from backup.

Not all drives are from the same batch. This one’s more up to chance but if you get a bad batch of drives they will likely fail around the same time so it’s best to get them in groups if you are buying drives in bulk.

The only thing I notice about older drives is the speed. I would say the real reason most people constantly buy new drives is capacity. I could go out and double my capacity if I just replaced all my drives with 20TB drives. I have all 8tb drives in my setup but I plan on buying 16-20TB drives when they start to fail.

Well don’t get too lazy. For media I do almost nothing except rename titles in Plex and fix issues as I see them. I transcode automatically with tdarr but if it fails on a file I don’t look into it. I’m pretty lazy and disorganized so having tools like radarr is nice. The bad part about me being lazy and disorganized is I tend to not organize my personal files.

I just spent 8 hours today moving my own data around structuring it in a way that hopefully makes sense. I have probably another 3 weekends of reorganization to do. I build my server years ago to store all my own data but because it was so disorganized it I basically just gave up besides setting up backups for my devices. I didn’t bother to collect all the data from the previous hard-drives that I used for backups and media storage. I do photography and videography as a hobby so I have a few of 4TB HDD filled with just my own footage. None of it’s backed up and it’s getting to that point that the disks will start failing if I don’t get organized and back stuff up appropriately.

My plan right now is to build a good foundation. Bring everything in just so I can see how much storage I need to build a second server to actually back it all up correctly. I estimate I have 15 TB of data across all the drives but I’m sure there is duplicates somewhere. Manually going through it all is going to be a PITA. I wish I had done a better job of keeping up with it over the years.

For me I used the cloud as my offsite backup but it’s only the most important stuff and it’s scattered between several Gmail accounts iCloud and OneDrive. Working on consolidation but right now it’s backed up somewhere other than my server. Back when I first started my data hoarding journey I only had a single harddrive and my old computer. Important stuff was already saved to the cloud so all I did was download it onto the drive. I still primarily save anything important in the cloud first but it’s all synced with my server too.

Only when children break into the server room.