Well don’t get too lazy. For media I do almost nothing except rename titles in Plex and fix issues as I see them. I transcode automatically with tdarr but if it fails on a file I don’t look into it. I’m pretty lazy and disorganized so having tools like radarr is nice. The bad part about me being lazy and disorganized is I tend to not organize my personal files.
I just spent 8 hours today moving my own data around structuring it in a way that hopefully makes sense. I have probably another 3 weekends of reorganization to do. I build my server years ago to store all my own data but because it was so disorganized it I basically just gave up besides setting up backups for my devices. I didn’t bother to collect all the data from the previous hard-drives that I used for backups and media storage. I do photography and videography as a hobby so I have a few of 4TB HDD filled with just my own footage. None of it’s backed up and it’s getting to that point that the disks will start failing if I don’t get organized and back stuff up appropriately.
My plan right now is to build a good foundation. Bring everything in just so I can see how much storage I need to build a second server to actually back it all up correctly. I estimate I have 15 TB of data across all the drives but I’m sure there is duplicates somewhere. Manually going through it all is going to be a PITA. I wish I had done a better job of keeping up with it over the years.
Just have a few good practices and you should really only have to buy harddrives when they fail. I have drives that are from 2008 that I only turn on when I want to go down memory lane.
Have a few copies of your data. Original, backup, offsite backup.
Backups have parity or redundancy so if a drive fails you can replace it without completely rebuilding from backup.
Not all drives are from the same batch. This one’s more up to chance but if you get a bad batch of drives they will likely fail around the same time so it’s best to get them in groups if you are buying drives in bulk.
The only thing I notice about older drives is the speed. I would say the real reason most people constantly buy new drives is capacity. I could go out and double my capacity if I just replaced all my drives with 20TB drives. I have all 8tb drives in my setup but I plan on buying 16-20TB drives when they start to fail.