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One very valuable resource that I frequent is a subreddit called datahoarder. The idea is to be your own library essentially. There are many guides that have been written up over the years, along with links to tools and best practices regarding data management. The more things you automate, the less you'll have to think about this. The biggest one missing from your list is Plex or Jellyfin, a way to organize and serve local content via a media server. That's the frontend and using it with automated downloaders like Radarr, for downloading higher quality or lower quality films of what you currently own. At some point storage is going to come into question, 10 2gb movie files is a better use of storage in this hypothetical than 1 high quality movie file. The other main thing is a website storage and cataloging tool, like wallabag or pocket.

I would spend a decent amount of time on organization. This is advice from hindsight. I have over 15TB of total storage but my folder structure is terrible so even though I have a lot of amazing things, I have to remember them and manually search for them.

The last critical thing I can think of is this search tool called Everything by Voidtools. It allows essentially instantaneous search of the entire ntfs based drive by filename or size. It's a windows tool, I am not sure what the equivalent would be on another OS. It's critical though, without it I would never be able to find anything. I have remapped my caps lock to that tool.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/index

https://www.voidtools.com/



My equivalent of the above - huge collection of x265 encoded 1080p movies, few tv shows, some anime, some disney/similar, quite a few documents that I mostly viewed and deemed worthy of keeping, or all ratings are so ridiculously high that it simply is a quality movie and I will enjoy it once I will see it later. FYI downloading this is perfectly legal where I live (Switzerland). That's one 10TB drive which isn't even full and I keep adding stuff that gets released (or re-released via remasters, various cuts etc).

x265 takes around 1.5GB for 1080p per movie in a very fine quality for us. I've collected it incrementally over time.

I can stream it form desktop PC or notebooks, anything with HDMI would work, no issues with codecs, subtitles etc. Never too lazy to do few clicks to watch something for 1.5-2.5h.

As for searching, Total commander has built in probably most powerful and intuitive disk search I ever saw, you can search by many criteria of file and its content (not form video perspective obviously).

I just organized it all via normal folders, and export current content of that HDD into simple text file if I need to check if I already have it, and if yes in what form. Normally HDD is turned off, I don't access it that often.




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