Asking mostly because I have fuckloads of video courses, plus a number of movies, that I have yet to even check if the content is as good as their titles imply and I really feel like I’m mostly hoarding this stuff because I have no fucking clue.
I just watch and delete because I don’t ever really watch anything more than a few times anyways.
The only kind of stuff I’ve ever made backups of is dev software and old keygens because . well - that kind of stuff disappears too easily with the new&shiny fad.
I usually just pirate ebooks, rarely videos or games, so my piracy doesnt take up much space. For videos I just keep em around since I have the space, and if i need to clear space I can just delete something I’ve already watched. And tbh I don’t remember the last time I pirated a game, I don’t play games a lot and the ones I do play I own legally lol
Oh I do pirate music too. It’s currently not taking up much disk space so I’m not bothered. I would probably just buy another drive if i ran out if music space.
I purposefully leave a lot of movies/shows on my hard drive that I don’t watch. I seed them and if I need more space I’ll just delete them. But otherwise I’m just wasting space on the drive
Haha, good question. You’re not alone with that. I suppose you just clean up once per year. Like you’re supposed to do with your wardrobe, or that one drawer in the kitchen…
Uh, no. I don’t know what I’m saying. I meant sort through, get rid of old stuff. I’ve never cleaned the insides that way. And I suppose don’t do that to the harddisk either.
I’m concerned that crackdowns on pirating will come sooner or later. At some point it may become too much of a hassle. So I’m hoarding a lifetime of old movies and games to hold me over.
What I mean is what is already happening in some countries, that is having laws that makes extra easy for copyright lawers to sue anyone using torrent for sharing their IP.
I mostly only load TV shows and movies. At least those are by large the biggest part in terms of storage taken. Well… I only load stuff that I actually want to watch. I also load some stuff for friends, but it has to be decent quality and be not totally niche (aka I’m eventually watching it, or other friends)
All the few shows/movies on my hard drive I end up watching when I get around to it and feel like watching. Though, recently, there have been 3 specific cartoons I’ve been watching a lot more of due to not feeling like watching other shows.
So far, the only things I have got that were bad quality and unwatchable were 2 cartoons. One you could easily tell it was upscaled and just looked a bit off, making it feel uncomfortable for me to watch and enjoy. The other, first episode in and they cut the theme song and had the channel watermark, for a show that’s a few decades, so I didn’t bother checking the other episodes and just deleted it. With the first show, I looked immediately because there was a specific episode I needed to check, but the other, it took me over a half a year to finally check to see how good quality it is/was.
I avoid hoarding by only grabbing things I know I’ll use. With movies/shows, if I haven’t used it in three months, it goes away. With music, I tend to go in cycles through genres where I’ll be vibing to a given type of music for a month or two, then switch things up. So the cutoff is much longer, years in fact.
But books are a slower thing to begin with. I’m a notoriously fast reader, capable of consuming light fiction at a book and a half to two books a day. Something like the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris, as an example, I can zip through the entire series in under a week if nothing interferes. But even at that speed (which isn’t consistent when there’s heavier material), it would still take years to go through my digital library. Plus, the files are small enough that I don’t have to worry about the space, so they only get deleted if I dislike something new.
The exception to all of that is some classics that I keep around just for the hell of it. Like, I have all the Hitchcock movies, but only watch any given one maybe once in five years. So I still have most of a terabyte of movies that’s as permanent as possible barring redundant storage all failing at once.
Music is similar, especially since most of it is in flac format. There’s some stuff I may not listen to often, but I want to keep immediately available.
Which, believe it or not, isn’t hoarding. I go through things and weed out fairly regularly. It’s just that after a collection is big enough, it takes longer to cycle through and use a given file again. Stuff that’s used isn’t hoarded.
I dont. Hard drives are increasingly cheap/large. I have to really dislike something to delete it. I have a fair amount of content that I don’t really plan on watching again, but someone I know might like it so i just leave it typically.
The velma tv show was the last item I just deleted.
But for me this is the same story. I’m up to 400TB… I’m just over half full. I’ve got plenty to go, and if I make to to 75-80% full, then I’m going to get me a 45 or 60 bay server and upgrade from my 36 bay one. 6 of the bays are wasted on SSD caching currently… Just finding a chassis that doesn’t waste the 3.5 inch bays on 2.5 drives would allow me to add a full vdev(another 100TB…).
Old chassis can be had on ebay relatively cheaply.
I run proxmox, so if it’s live on a server it’s probably on my ~70TB (really 40*2TB ssd) ceph cluster. Which makes 3 copies across the 5 boxes, so it’s more like 23TB of usable space for all my vms and such.
The 400TB of storage is Truenas is really closer to 300TB after all the losses in raidz vdev and hot spares and what have you, there’s 30x 16TB SAS seagates in the box, of which 2 are hot spares and 7 are parity for raidz1… For things that are slow or linear loads (a movie file could be a good example of that type of workload!). Backups of the the proxmox boxes… and mass stored stuff, 99% of it I could easily obtain again if I had to. Although I’d probably be pretty flustered about it.
Truly important stuff gets written to 100GB bluray(s) (specifically m-disc blurays) and put in the safe. I do this probably about once a year or so…
My dad was in the process of setting up his own cluster that’s running 14TB drives rather than my 16TB… When he’s finally done I intend to requisition probably about half of his space for offsite storage (maybe more). I’m figuring about 100TB of space is what I’ll have there. Maybe more. He’s about 65 miles away from me, different electrical grid and all.
So the count as it stands now. Everything running has at least 2 copies on 2 mediums (ceph cluster, and spinning rust). My “linux iso” repositories only live on the spinning rust storage, but is low priority anyway. Super important highly sensitive shit lives on at least 3 copies and 3 mediums, although one of the mediums may be out of date and none is offsite… Though it’s rare I add to this category. There is plans for adding another copy of data, offsite on harddrive storage for most of my dataset as it is now.
Where are you sourcing your hardware? Decommissioned enterprise DC stuff or are there options outside of the enterprise space that enable this type of setup?
Ebay and decommission. I got really lucky on my SSDs, those were all from a decommission. Company was going to pay an ITAD for destruction. I picked it all up and wiped it on site. The rest are relatively cheap hardware, supermicros and such… but with enough of them you can build a resilient cluster.
A lot of my stuff is Ebay… I did recently purchase a new rack as probably the only “new” item I have in regards to my setup. The old one had issues… and I didn’t want to deal with thrifting broken racks anymore. And I needed a taller 45U rack rather than a 42U standard rack… Also the more depth means I can accommodate the 60 bay server in the future if it comes to that.
But things like 40gbps networking… ebay.
The proxmox servers are decomissioned.
the truenas server was ebay.
switches was ebay…
Oh! The firewalls… That was new purchase. I am stupid lucky to live somewhere with 8gbps fiber. I needed real horsepower to push that with IDS/IPS enabled. So this was a new purchase from supermicro.
The SAS spinning rust drives I picked up on Reddit homelabsales or something like that a while back.
PDU’s were ebay…
UPS were ebay… Expansion batteries were craigslist.
Most cables were new from FS
Previous versions of my rack were government liquidation/auctions. My dad has a lot of that equipment now. I found one auction that was 1400$ that was basically a whole racks worth of shit… most of it pretty usable 12 and 13th gen dells. And another auction for 600$ that had a dell m1000e with some 4TB of DDR4 ram…
But you can do a lot of this shit with a cluster of little N100 boxes if you really wanted. I just happened to get my hands on enterprise level equipment… So I joined the Romans…
This is a detailed breakdown so thank you. I guess the tl;dr is that it’s a combo of ebay, luck, and filling in the gaps. Sounds about as complicated as I was expecting if I’m honest but I appreciate you taking the time to write it out.
I have two servers, a >100TB rack-mounted Supermicro archive that doesn’t get fired up often, and an Intel NUC that runs 24/7 but only draws 5W at idle. The NUC with its mere 4TB SSD is only for content I’m actively watching which gets deleted immediately afterwards. Running just the Supermicro made more sense when I had a terrible internet connection and had to wait for everything but I moved to an area with 1Gb+ connectivity a few years ago and subsequently needed to save on energy costs.
I feel like the real question you want to ask yourself is, “how likely is it that this particular content will still be available on Usenet/torrents in a few years?” Some stuff is much more niche and rare while other movies/shows each have over a dozen redundant releases, at least a few of which will more or less always be available somewhere. To put things in perspective, it also helps to do an analysis of how much you’re spending each month in order to avoid what you would be paying in streaming and licensing costs, including hardware, power, and connectivity. If that ratio gets too high then it’s time to scale back.
how likely is it that this particular content will still be available on Usenet/torrents in a few years?
I’ve had quite a bit of trouble finding the old Rome Total War some time ago, before the remaster was released. I’ve took the chance to get Medieval 2 as well. Both are sitting on my hard drive, guess they’re worth keeping for longer
I seed until the ratio is 2.0 which I think is fine for popular torrents. I keep seeding obscure stuff that I struggled to download myself, but that’s quite rare, so it doesn’t lead to ‘hoarding’.
I feel like I’m being wasteful, saving up a lot to probably never actually use. Can’t even seed some of the stuff because there are no torrents, so I have to resort to direct download sites way more often than I’d like, no less.
How do I avoid Hoarding? Well I have a total of 2.75tb of space, so when it gets a bit full I go through and delete shit we watched already so I have space for more stuff
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I just watch and delete because I don’t ever really watch anything more than a few times anyways.
The only kind of stuff I’ve ever made backups of is dev software and old keygens because . well - that kind of stuff disappears too easily with the new&shiny fad.
I usually just pirate ebooks, rarely videos or games, so my piracy doesnt take up much space. For videos I just keep em around since I have the space, and if i need to clear space I can just delete something I’ve already watched. And tbh I don’t remember the last time I pirated a game, I don’t play games a lot and the ones I do play I own legally lol
Oh I do pirate music too. It’s currently not taking up much disk space so I’m not bothered. I would probably just buy another drive if i ran out if music space.
I purposefully leave a lot of movies/shows on my hard drive that I don’t watch. I seed them and if I need more space I’ll just delete them. But otherwise I’m just wasting space on the drive
Haha, good question. You’re not alone with that. I suppose you just clean up once per year. Like you’re supposed to do with your wardrobe, or that one drawer in the kitchen…
You’re supposed to clean your wardrobe?
Uh, no. I don’t know what I’m saying. I meant sort through, get rid of old stuff. I’ve never cleaned the insides that way. And I suppose don’t do that to the harddisk either.
Instructions unclear, am currently taking a bath with my SSD
I’m concerned that crackdowns on pirating will come sooner or later. At some point it may become too much of a hassle. So I’m hoarding a lifetime of old movies and games to hold me over.
Just keep seeding the torrents. As long as the torrents for stuff is healthy, how could it be cracked down?
Enough countries ban torrenting so you cannot even uses vpn to get around it.
How do they do that?
Ask Germany. Torrenting without VPN is almost imposible, you’ll get sued by copyright lawyers.
Exactly, so you can use a VPN to get around that.
You use a vpn to other country without that ban. Once enough countries apply that ban. Where are you going to VPN to?
Why would any country ban torrenting? Torrenting isn’t illegal, downloading and distributing copyrighted works is
What I mean is what is already happening in some countries, that is having laws that makes extra easy for copyright lawers to sue anyone using torrent for sharing their IP.
I only dl shit i’m interested in. After watching if it’s gonna be rewatched, it goes on the fserve. If not, delete
I mostly only load TV shows and movies. At least those are by large the biggest part in terms of storage taken. Well… I only load stuff that I actually want to watch. I also load some stuff for friends, but it has to be decent quality and be not totally niche (aka I’m eventually watching it, or other friends)
No issue hoarding if you’re seeding
All the few shows/movies on my hard drive I end up watching when I get around to it and feel like watching. Though, recently, there have been 3 specific cartoons I’ve been watching a lot more of due to not feeling like watching other shows.
So far, the only things I have got that were bad quality and unwatchable were 2 cartoons. One you could easily tell it was upscaled and just looked a bit off, making it feel uncomfortable for me to watch and enjoy. The other, first episode in and they cut the theme song and had the channel watermark, for a show that’s a few decades, so I didn’t bother checking the other episodes and just deleted it. With the first show, I looked immediately because there was a specific episode I needed to check, but the other, it took me over a half a year to finally check to see how good quality it is/was.
I avoid hoarding by only grabbing things I know I’ll use. With movies/shows, if I haven’t used it in three months, it goes away. With music, I tend to go in cycles through genres where I’ll be vibing to a given type of music for a month or two, then switch things up. So the cutoff is much longer, years in fact.
But books are a slower thing to begin with. I’m a notoriously fast reader, capable of consuming light fiction at a book and a half to two books a day. Something like the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris, as an example, I can zip through the entire series in under a week if nothing interferes. But even at that speed (which isn’t consistent when there’s heavier material), it would still take years to go through my digital library. Plus, the files are small enough that I don’t have to worry about the space, so they only get deleted if I dislike something new.
The exception to all of that is some classics that I keep around just for the hell of it. Like, I have all the Hitchcock movies, but only watch any given one maybe once in five years. So I still have most of a terabyte of movies that’s as permanent as possible barring redundant storage all failing at once.
Music is similar, especially since most of it is in flac format. There’s some stuff I may not listen to often, but I want to keep immediately available.
Which, believe it or not, isn’t hoarding. I go through things and weed out fairly regularly. It’s just that after a collection is big enough, it takes longer to cycle through and use a given file again. Stuff that’s used isn’t hoarded.
I dont. Hard drives are increasingly cheap/large. I have to really dislike something to delete it. I have a fair amount of content that I don’t really plan on watching again, but someone I know might like it so i just leave it typically.
deleted by creator
The velma tv show was the last item I just deleted.
But for me this is the same story. I’m up to 400TB… I’m just over half full. I’ve got plenty to go, and if I make to to 75-80% full, then I’m going to get me a 45 or 60 bay server and upgrade from my 36 bay one. 6 of the bays are wasted on SSD caching currently… Just finding a chassis that doesn’t waste the 3.5 inch bays on 2.5 drives would allow me to add a full vdev(another 100TB…).
Old chassis can be had on ebay relatively cheaply.
Do you have an offsite backup? Or do you only backup specifics? Like 10-20% of that?
I do not have full proper offsites… yet.
I run proxmox, so if it’s live on a server it’s probably on my ~70TB (really 40*2TB ssd) ceph cluster. Which makes 3 copies across the 5 boxes, so it’s more like 23TB of usable space for all my vms and such. The 400TB of storage is Truenas is really closer to 300TB after all the losses in raidz vdev and hot spares and what have you, there’s 30x 16TB SAS seagates in the box, of which 2 are hot spares and 7 are parity for raidz1… For things that are slow or linear loads (a movie file could be a good example of that type of workload!). Backups of the the proxmox boxes… and mass stored stuff, 99% of it I could easily obtain again if I had to. Although I’d probably be pretty flustered about it.
Truly important stuff gets written to 100GB bluray(s) (specifically m-disc blurays) and put in the safe. I do this probably about once a year or so…
My dad was in the process of setting up his own cluster that’s running 14TB drives rather than my 16TB… When he’s finally done I intend to requisition probably about half of his space for offsite storage (maybe more). I’m figuring about 100TB of space is what I’ll have there. Maybe more. He’s about 65 miles away from me, different electrical grid and all.
So the count as it stands now. Everything running has at least 2 copies on 2 mediums (ceph cluster, and spinning rust). My “linux iso” repositories only live on the spinning rust storage, but is low priority anyway. Super important highly sensitive shit lives on at least 3 copies and 3 mediums, although one of the mediums may be out of date and none is offsite… Though it’s rare I add to this category. There is plans for adding another copy of data, offsite on harddrive storage for most of my dataset as it is now.
Truenas usages:
And here’s Ceph
Your setup: goals.
Where are you sourcing your hardware? Decommissioned enterprise DC stuff or are there options outside of the enterprise space that enable this type of setup?
Ebay and decommission. I got really lucky on my SSDs, those were all from a decommission. Company was going to pay an ITAD for destruction. I picked it all up and wiped it on site. The rest are relatively cheap hardware, supermicros and such… but with enough of them you can build a resilient cluster.
A lot of my stuff is Ebay… I did recently purchase a new rack as probably the only “new” item I have in regards to my setup. The old one had issues… and I didn’t want to deal with thrifting broken racks anymore. And I needed a taller 45U rack rather than a 42U standard rack… Also the more depth means I can accommodate the 60 bay server in the future if it comes to that.
But things like 40gbps networking… ebay. The proxmox servers are decomissioned. the truenas server was ebay. switches was ebay… Oh! The firewalls… That was new purchase. I am stupid lucky to live somewhere with 8gbps fiber. I needed real horsepower to push that with IDS/IPS enabled. So this was a new purchase from supermicro. The SAS spinning rust drives I picked up on Reddit homelabsales or something like that a while back. PDU’s were ebay… UPS were ebay… Expansion batteries were craigslist. Most cables were new from FS
Previous versions of my rack were government liquidation/auctions. My dad has a lot of that equipment now. I found one auction that was 1400$ that was basically a whole racks worth of shit… most of it pretty usable 12 and 13th gen dells. And another auction for 600$ that had a dell m1000e with some 4TB of DDR4 ram…
But you can do a lot of this shit with a cluster of little N100 boxes if you really wanted. I just happened to get my hands on enterprise level equipment… So I joined the Romans…
This is a detailed breakdown so thank you. I guess the tl;dr is that it’s a combo of ebay, luck, and filling in the gaps. Sounds about as complicated as I was expecting if I’m honest but I appreciate you taking the time to write it out.
These are my thoughts exactly; piracy is preservation.
I have two servers, a >100TB rack-mounted Supermicro archive that doesn’t get fired up often, and an Intel NUC that runs 24/7 but only draws 5W at idle. The NUC with its mere 4TB SSD is only for content I’m actively watching which gets deleted immediately afterwards. Running just the Supermicro made more sense when I had a terrible internet connection and had to wait for everything but I moved to an area with 1Gb+ connectivity a few years ago and subsequently needed to save on energy costs.
I feel like the real question you want to ask yourself is, “how likely is it that this particular content will still be available on Usenet/torrents in a few years?” Some stuff is much more niche and rare while other movies/shows each have over a dozen redundant releases, at least a few of which will more or less always be available somewhere. To put things in perspective, it also helps to do an analysis of how much you’re spending each month in order to avoid what you would be paying in streaming and licensing costs, including hardware, power, and connectivity. If that ratio gets too high then it’s time to scale back.
I’ve had quite a bit of trouble finding the old Rome Total War some time ago, before the remaster was released. I’ve took the chance to get Medieval 2 as well. Both are sitting on my hard drive, guess they’re worth keeping for longer
I only download what I plan to consume shortly, then delete.
I do almost that, but I don’t delete so that I can seed
I seed until the ratio is 2.0 which I think is fine for popular torrents. I keep seeding obscure stuff that I struggled to download myself, but that’s quite rare, so it doesn’t lead to ‘hoarding’.
what is the problem?
I feel like I’m being wasteful, saving up a lot to probably never actually use. Can’t even seed some of the stuff because there are no torrents, so I have to resort to direct download sites way more often than I’d like, no less.
Use a 256 GB ssd Good luck hoarding on that rice grain
And this is why I consider SSDs to be a downgrade compared to HDDs lol
How do I avoid Hoarding? Well I have a total of 2.75tb of space, so when it gets a bit full I go through and delete shit we watched already so I have space for more stuff