You can also look at !datahoarder@lemmy.ml for this kind of questions. It was full of good advice on reddit and I'm sure it will be equivalent on Lemmy.

I only store "rare old hard to get stuff that I loved a lot" but I just delete everything else after watching so I never have more than a 1TB drive half empty from which I also delete what I downloaded but will never watch after some time. All of that on my Raspberry pi home server with Emby and CasaOs.

4x 18TB (ironwolf)

2x 250GB (970 evos) SSD cache

SHR (1 disk redundancy)

in a synology DS918+ NAS,

gives me ~47TB usable space in one enclosure

and

4x 8TB (ironwolf)

RAID 5 (1 disk redundancy)

in a OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad

gives me ~25TB usable space in the other

I have about 15TB of media stored, I like 4K HDR DV content and tend to rewatch stuff a lot. I don't store anything that I have access to on a streaming service (unless it's not available in 4K)

Games and softwares: I store the installers, delete if I don't like it

Music: store them all, even if some songs in an album isn't my cup of tea

Videos: want to save all of them, but my storage is pretty small in the first place, so I pick the ones I really like

Ebooks: only downloaded a few, but still save them all

Mangas: usually save unless I don't really like it or no reason to reread

I store as much as I can on NAS. You never know when you'll have internet issues while still having power or when something will be pulled from the net.

I have ~115TB of spinning rust currently. I house them (collection of 8-14TB WD white labels) in a DS4243 in which I replaced the IOM3s with IOM6s. I have this hooked up to a R630 (via an H200 IT controller) running ESXi with several VMs including a Windows VM running SnapRAID+Drivepool to manage the storage. I have the pool setup as a network share and run a docker stack with in which I bind the storage in fstab to my *arr setup, nzbhydra, rdt-client, etc. Someday I may transition to a full Linux setup with freenas, but this setup has served me well for years.

Since I mainly download music, yes I store it forever. Too much good stuff just disappears online especially stuff I listen to.

As for shows and movies, I download and save more obscure stuff, but I really watch TV/movies anyways so.

I currently have a 18tb drive that I got for like $140.

I used to store all my music on an HDD but the more, I thought about it. The less I did it. Still have about 68GB of music but won't continue doing so. Don't really keep movies or TV Shows stored, as I know, I will watch them once and then never again - Same thing for games.

Perhaps I will in the future when I can actually afford decent HDD/SSD's. I'm curious how other do it.

Buy cheap 4 bay nas and 3-4 disks (3 disks minimum) and setup raid 5 which will allow one disk failure. If a disk fails, pop disk out, put new one in (equivalent size or larger) and it will rebuild.

You could probably try build one using normal pc hardware and freenas software, but I personally find a purpose built nas operating system less of a headache and fairly cost effective

I keep everything I download as long as it's of sufficient quality on many large HDD's. Most of my media is then served through Jellyfin. Considering the state of the internet recently I think it's important to download what you care about before it becomes unavailable.

I store pretty much everything unless there is no chance for reuse. My current setup is a 4u unRAID server with 108TB of double parity protected storage (plus 2 2TB NVME drives in raid 1 for cache).

I have around 80TB comprised of 8-14TB WD drives (mostly Elements/EasyStore shucked from their cases) in my Fractal Design Define R6 case. I typically don't delete anything unless it was a user requested item thats no longer being used with little replayability (stuff like Survivor or other reality TV). Currently running it all on windows with SnapRAID and DrivePool to manage the storage.

I have Jellyfin set up a with a few drives in jbod on my server. I have the list of what media I have on it stored elsewhere though, and losing one of the drives wouldn’t be a tragedy. I usually stick already used ones into that role. My internet’s that fast that it would only take a week or so to re-download all 8TB. I use Sonarr & Radarr though, so it would also be trivial for me to automate that process.

Yes I do, I have 2 hard drives 8+5 with the 8TB one getting pretty close to full so I'll need to buy a new one pretty soon, I don't stream so I don't need something like a NAS setup with Plex or Kodi

I store my media, on mirrored disks the ones I scanned myself (to much work, mainly music), series are kept, some mirrored, some not. Movies are kept until I need more space. (I have about 6T mirrored and 8T unmirrored space for all data, including my backups, pictures,...

Anything I can download is pretty expendable, unless I really like it/it took a lot of time to get or find.

Given only 24Mbps of download speed split between everything in one household, keeping things likely to be rewatched backed up not only saves bandwidth, but also makes having a 4K TV somewhat worthwhile.

When it comes to movies and series: I permanently store the best ones and immidiately delete the bad ones. Something in between I usually keep until I reach a ratio over 5. I just don't have a seperate huge drive to store everything

Currently have 2x8TB & 2x18TB in a ZFS vdev config on TrueNAS. So usable space is ~22TB and i store everything i load on there until it's really really not important anymore.

So far. I only have 3TB in my NAS (RAID5) at the moment. I'll see if the money I save on streaming services will pay for another array by the time I run out of storage.

For me personally, I only keep things I find worth rewatching, so about 50% I delete after. Same with e-books. Games I don't really pirate (or only pirate them to see if I can run them on my computer). Usually I buy them on Steam and that's good enough, even though sometimes you lose access to them. I tend to not go back to older games.

I have around 24TB of drives. 6TB Home Theater NAS made of HDD and Pi4. 2x 4TB as a backup for my NAS and some other files. 4TB SSD in my PC (78 games installed) and in my PS4 (150ish games installed). Important games I backed up, all movies, shows and documentaries are backed up, plus my files (photos, documents, pirated software, etc). Plus most important things like family photos and documents are backed up online (encrypted) and offline on sd card and flash drive.

Considering expanding of my collection.. Every show and movie I enjoy is added to my NAS. Same goes for games, but I tend to buy them when they're cheap or I'm so excited that I preorder. I don't play that much anymore. Last time I preordered Hogwards Legacy and before ME Legendary Edition.

I have one 12 TB and two 14 internal hard drives. I also have 6 external drives (two 12 TB, four 14 TB) for 2x redundant backups. All my new stuff and dynamic documents are stored on the 12 TB drive (so that I only have to update the backups for that drive frequently). When it gets fullish I migrate content over to the storage drives and update those backups. I've been doing this maybe twice a year.

I also have my dynamic files, photos, docs etc, set to auto backup twice daily to a remote backup.

I only delete content to replace with higher quality.

I haven't bothered with any sort of raid in nearly two decades. You need proper backups regardless so what's the point? If I have to run half my Plex library off a USB backup drive for a week while a new drive runs badsector and syncs up... who cares? Merging the drives as a JBOB is nifty and all, but adds complexity across the board without meaningful gain.

2x12TB in RAID1, but I'll switch to RAID6 when I have enough funds to get a rack mount NAS with 12 bays.

(5) 4TB hard drives in a Truenas Core server with Sonarr, Radarr, NZBGet, and Plex plugins.

Kind of a pain to set up the plugins correctly but once it's running it's great.

i own stock in western digital (meaning i have stacks of hard drives and a dock)

I store contents on 128GB BDXL Blu Ray discs, I like to have all the media easily accessible and don't want to degrade anytime I play it. If its larger than that I will put in on an SSD.