Bob Odenkirk has never steered us wrong, thanks. I downloaded three copies of this from YouTube in case I forget.

That’s incredibly helpful and informative, a great read. Thanks so much!

That’s a great point.

The Backblaze option is something I’ve seriously considered.

Any reason this person didn’t go with the $99/year personal backup plan? It says “unlimited” and it is for my household only, but maybe I’m missing something about how difficult it is to setup on Unraid or other NAS software. B2’s $6/TB/mo rate would put me at $150/mo which is not great.

For me, I have a bad memory. I might remember a childhood movie (a nickname I give to special Linux ISOs) that I hadn’t even thought of for 10 years and track down a copy, sometimes excavating obscure sources, and that may be hours of one-time inspiration and work repeated many times over. Having a complete list is a good helper, but a full backup of course is best.

Yeah, this is certainly a viable “brute-force”-ish ooption. While I have 56, I’m only using 26 or so. But I’d actually be hesitant to do anything less than a full capacity mirror because I do expect to eventually use this (and more - adding drives to Unraid).

I’ve balked because of cost and upkeep (maintaining the same capacity, additional chances for drive failure, two separate sites I need physical access to with a high bandwidth connection), so I admit I was hoping I was missing an easier option.

Do you have logs or software that keeps track of what you need to redownload? A big stress for me with that method is remembering or keeping track of what is lost when I and software can’t even see the filesystem anymore.