How many movies do you have? A 5TB hard drive is slightly over $100 and will hold a minimum of 100 Blu-ray rips, assuming they use the entire disk capacity and you don't reencode them to something smaller.
Second, my Vudu library contains over 600 movies and significantly more television shows than that. And before you calculate the cost of the storage, bear in mind there's another, secondary cost: The much higher cost I'd have spent to have built that library solely on ripped discs. I never paid full price for a digital purchase. (And specifically, never more than it would've cost to acquire it via disc.)
Third, time. I'm also significantly backlogged in organizing my ebooks, which I do store on drives. Blu-ray ripping time just isn't something I want to dedicate a big chunk of my life to.
I ended up replacing my NetApp StorVault (6TB (4TB usable), RAID6) with a FreeNAS box from iXSystems (24TB (20TB usable), RAID6) which cost me a bit more than $2500. (it is also much quieter than the StorVault was :-)). And on that 20TB I've stored a bit more than 200 book volumes that I had digitized at 1DollarScan, probably close to 1000 magazines (scanned generally manually with my ScanSnap 1500), and perhaps as many PDF documents that were never printed to begin with (like data sheets). I also have my music collection, and I have recently looked at putting movies on there as well since the streaming services are letting me down here as well.
At the end of the day it is the 21st century version of one's personal library.
The other thing I'm interested in, and wonder if you have thoughts on: When you pass, your personal library is inherited. Will people know what to do with your digital library? Will it be useful? Will people want it?
The tools for processing PDFs into searchable text have a lot of warts. For a while IBM was offering a free Watson service to do this (now its part of Watson Discovery) which has some warts. I did manage a set of perl scripts that would post process the statements that I downloaded from the bank into CSV files, but I would still like to pull tabular data out of PDF book scans to make the data they provide more useful.
I have a simple frontend based on the perl Mojolicious module which Blekko had developed as part of another project but my indexing tools are still quite primitive. Simple bi-gram and tri-grams, and a growing synonym index. I don't give it enough queries to use my own traffic for ranking feedback. So basically everything is nearly equal rank. Basically I am about to the AltaVista level of search capability :-).
The vision is it just runs as a server and anyone on the same network can access it like a web service an pull up documents (and in the future media) of interest.
I'm just hoping the movie/TV industry gets the picture soon and goes the way the music industry has with streaming.
Sad state for the industry, really.
You don’t have to throw away the disk after you rip it. The disk itself is a great backup.
Personally, I prefer everything to be in my Plex server, but I’m in no rush and just rip as I go. I’ll probably never actually rip every one. By the sounds of it, I don’t even have anywhere close to the number of disks to rip as you, so I get it no being appealing.
It's rather easy to get TOS'ed even if you match filenames of common pirate name signatures.
Do you have any examples where someone's Backblaze account was terminated for backing up pirated media?
I still suggest it for friends and family because it's cheap and damn sure that encryption is better than nothing, but if you have a lot of sensitive data I wouldn't recommend it. If you demand privacy, use Restic and Backblaze's B2 service, you're paying per GB then though.
First, though, find out if your friends or family have an Office365 subscription. A lot of people get one because they want the Office apps, and don't make heavy use of the 1 TB of OneDrive storage that it includes. Restic vis rclone should be able to use that for backups.
Backblaze is cheap, but using something you have already paid for is even cheaper. :-)
Several other cloud backup programs do have OneDrive support built in, including Arq, duplicity, duplicati, duplicacy, and GoodSync. There are probably others.
This adds up to a few hundred dollars that you wouldn't need to spend if the DRMs implemented were sane and reasonable with legal owners. And I don't even factor in the cost of the time, electrical power, or computing power involved to make it happen.
5TB to 8TB hard drives are cost-efficient in my experience. 6x 8TB Hard Drives for 24TB of storage (RAID1 like redundancy. Use ZFS btw) is $1200 (~$200 per 8TB hard drive).
> invest in a paid off-site backup service for failures
What's your recovery plan? If you want to recover 5TB of data off of a 100 MBit connection, that's 140 Hours. Local is the only thing that makes sense if you're at the point of filling up hard drives.
Having 1Gbps or even 10Gbps (local "fiber" with Direct Attached Copper) connections locally is relatively cheap. And it seems like 10Gbps is getting cheaper.
Accessing a hard drive, even a sped-up RAID set of drives, over 10Gbps is going to have the same bandwidth as a local SATA connection. (SATA is only 6Gbps). Your NAS is practically a "local drive" at that point.
It's a media archive. As long as you can recover specific files on demand, it doesn't really matter if it takes two months to download the entire thing.