Shimitar

I have been far luckier than that all my life, I never had a drive fail on me, and I keep them a looong time.

Maybe once, 20 years ago, a drive failed? Can’t really remember, but probably it did happen. Being on a Linux software RAID 1, just remove and plug a new drive, run an attach command and forget.

I have 4 6Tb HDDs which I got new from work: been running 24/7 for the last 6 years.

The 4Tb drives they replaced where running for the previous 10 years (bought new as well) and are still in a drawer, got replaced only for the opportunity to upgrade to 6tb.

If your refurbished last only 4 years, to be that is not a positive gain, you lost money. New drives should last 10 years in my personal (and debatable) experience. But I think those drives you bought will last more than 4 years.

Restic or Borg. For restic I use the great Backrest web GUI.

I mounted an USB drive to one of my OpenWRT access points and backup on that one.

Rclone or fuse can mount/access Google Drive and can be used as back end for your backup choice.

Simplest backup ever: restic/Borg on a folder on the same PC. Not very recommendable, but indeed a good starting point.

Zfs/brtfs seems a complex solution for a simple problem. True is that once you start eating you get hungrier so maybe worthwhile.

Their box is not going to play those videos, so AV1 is game.

Anyway software playback of AV1 is a thing, and works, you know.

I do it on daylight when my FV pumps out Wh…

A little bit day by day.

I have been hosting my mail server for over 10 years. You need to study dkim, dmark and all the other stuff, but it can be done indeed and its not scary at all.

If the price is right for you, go for it. You will run containers and or VMs, so doesn’t really matter what your bare metal is.

I would choose something where I can install Linux easily and nice and I am sure at the Mac mini price point you can build yourself an assembled mini-pc with beefer specs, but indeed it’s more work and hassle.

YMMV

Recode to AV1, free and open codec with a better compression and quality than 265.

Its future proof and more and more supported out of the box everywhere.

Either go tdarr, or check https://github.com/gardiol/media_fixer for a neat bash script capable of find and convert your videos automatically