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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Remember to keep a local offline mirror of your favorite content from ripped physical media, online archives and aggregators. Rotate every 5 years to larger, newer drives that can store higher-resolution versions. Nothing is infallible, including archive.org, infocon.org, flickr, github/gitlab/sourceforge, YT/peertube/rumble, kiwix/stackoverflow/wikipedia and long-tail niche websites.

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Alas, I have external drives from 2015, 2010, etc. that I've never filled up completely. Should I consolidate on a newer one and junk them? Some I haven't accessed in years.

It's good to periodically consolidate onto a new mirrored pair of reputable spinning rust with ZFS or another filesystem that can automatically monitor for bitrot, even if you keep the old ones around (drive reliability economics varied over time as vendors consolidated).

Gives opportunity for sorting archives into tiers of importance based on current perspective. Content with highest ratio of importance/size can be stored on enterprise-grade SSD.

The best motivation for keeping healthy archives is to use them :) It's worth finding offline OSS/paid software to help categorize/search/browse archives. Upcoming offline LLMs should also help.

Tailscale on Apple TV (and other devices) can be an exit node for remote streaming access to archives on home networks.

It's kinda amazing the results you get just by putting your collection together in something like Jellyfin, and getting the metadata etc.

Like having your own Netflix service.... I found I watched a lot more of my movies that way... than when they were just sitting on my drive.

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