Do you use software to organise files and remove duplicates?
Yes and no. I use my two hands + one eye (the other doesn’t work) + find, du, rsync (in comparison mode) and diff. Everything I have is on a FreeBSD VM (docs, pictures) + Ubuntu VM (movies) so native tools work great for me.
How do you store and backup your data?
I have multiple Proxmox hosts that are not in a cluster. All of them and their VMs are being backed up on a physically separate Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) locally every day. In addition to that this system does rsnapshot backups on all of the VMs and hosts I care about. So it has 2 different storage backends (disk pools) - 1 for rsnapshot and 1 for Proxmox Backup Server. Both are 20TB in size and one uses XFS and the other uses EXT4. Every day the PBS backups are synced to a remote PBS instance in Hetzner Germany (my systems are in Bulgaria). The Hetzner system has 40TB in raidz2 (ZFS) and keeps all of the backups for 2 years. My storage VMs are also configured to do snapshots every 15 minutes and keep them for 24h. Yearly I also download my most important data and write it to BD discs and store those in my summer house.
So in short I have the following: Local snapshots every 15 minutes, 2 daily backups on an independent system using different software and storage backends, 1 daily remote backup on a system in another country, 1 yearly offline backup. It’s not perfect but it’s affordable and somewhat secure.
To comfort you, this CD appears to be an empty disc which was either under water for a long period of time or forgotten in a basement or similar. No data was lost probably as it was empty to begin with.
Not confirmed but promising - https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/15526#issuecomment-1810800004 and https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/15526#issuecomment-1810819382
It’s a matter of preference since we have no hard data to support either claim. I personally avoid 2nd hand HDDs and monitors because way back in the day those were notoriously unreliable especially from brands like Maxtor. Nowadays I guess it’s ok but then again new HDDs aren’t so expensive anymore so I just get one with warranty and move on.
Ah heck I just updated my NAS VM to FreeBSD 14.
Anyone running FreeBSD 14, make sure vfs.zfs.bclone_enabled is set to 0.
You forgot the obligatory FedEx truck full of external HDDs hurtling down the highway. 😂
No, every time you watch a video you actually download it in chunks. It’s illegal to redistribute the said video or make money off it without permission from the creator. That’s called stealing. Apart from that you are free to do whatever you like, YT ToS might say otherwise but thankfully Google isn’t an authority yet.