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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
Honestly, unless you can spend more $, one or two USB disks for the mini pc is probably your only choice.
Yeah that's probably true. Perhaps something like this?
Hardware RAID. Not too expensive.
Yeah it's USB and not likely to be super performant, but I don't think I need super fast read/write for media playback.
If this fits your budget (you still need the actuals disks..) it's not a bad choice. Speed should be sufficient for HDDs, as it's USB 3.
As the other poster suggested, don't use its hardware raid. Use it as a JBOD and configure the raid in Linux with ZFS or similar.
And never forget: RAID is not a backup! You still need to do regular backups, at least for important data.
Oh yeah, I backup all configs 4*day. The good thing about torrenting is even if I had catastrophic loss, as long as I have the list of torrents it should repopulate (assuming someone's seeding).
Of course I also want to self host my personal photos/videos, and I can't afford to lose those. I'll have to look into seeing if any solutions support local storage plus maybe object storage as a backup.
This would be my recommendation as well. Either a shuckable external drive or a standard 3.5" drive with a USB 3.0 enclosure so you have the option to slot the drives into a NAS or server in the future.