I can never predict how the future is going to go. I can make an educated guess based on my past knowledge, but theres no way of knowing how close or far off the mark I will be when the time comes. While I certainly could have predicted how things might have turned out, given our current government, I don't think I would have guessed just how quickly everything would start to shift and fall apart. I have no certainty that things we will make it out of this un-changed.
But that's not the real point of this. The real point is: do I need to upgrade my home server? As in, should I buy a new server before the parts become prohibitively expensive? I worry that the answer is yes, because I don't have the money for that. My current server setup is fairly reserved. I run a 2023 M2 Mac mini, with two external USB drives, and one proper drive-bay drive, whatever you want to call that. I currently use it exclusively for Plex, and it's getting full. At the current moment, I have 4.2 TB of movies, 3.2 TB of anime, 2.4 TB of tv shows, and 1.1 TB of music. Of my 14 or so TB of storage, I have about 2 TB left between the drives. It fills up fast.
Considering out current government, though, I think I need to start expanding, both in storage, and in scope. I want to save things that may or may not make it out of the next four years. I think owning physical media is important, yes—but protecting media from deletion is just as important. I have no idea what may come, but if they start coming after media: movies, shows, music, books, video games, etc., I want to ensure that I have as much stuff archived as possible. In fact, before I even think of upgrading my set-up, I'm going to start small.
To start, I need to archive the No-Intro ROM sets for all games between NES and N64. Having a cold storage of every video game ever released (within reason) would be handy. Next, I need to start archiving Project Gutenburg (within reason). Again, I have no idea what may happen in the future, but having an archive of public domain novels would be useful. Then, having an archive of Wikipedia will come next. I believe its only about 89GB, including images. Granted, that is just the english language Wikipedia, but seeing as that's the only language I speak, I think that's enough.
After that, I know I'm going to need to upgrade my server, by adding a new NAS. I'm looking into getting four 8 TB drives and another 4-bay drive. That'll cost me about $700, but I think it'll be worth it to get 32TB more of archive space. Then I can look into consolidating my files into one file-system, rather than splitting them between the drives wherever they may fit.
--27 January 2025--