A NAS, yes, but why bother with a backup process? I know it's sacrilege for most admins, but if you're already pirating the media you can just pirate it again if your storage breaks. Yes it takes a while but so would restoring from regular backups.

Backup the .torrent files, skip the rest.

Or you just buy a random NAS from a store, and do none of that. Sure, that's more expensive and less featurefull, but you do not need to know anything.

Naw.

> Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive).

I have bandwidth, and I also have automation. If my collection of pirated movies takes a dive tomorrow due to some failure or other, then I can just instruct the machine to download it all again.

Backing up the automation bits and the list of films is inexpensive -- that data is small enough that it can even happen for free. The movies themselves are huge, but that big data is completely replaceable; losing it only represents an inconvenience. The Internet is my backup.

> You need to keep your NAS up to date.

My "NAS" is the same desktop machine that I'm writing this comment with -- and that's perfectly OK. It's a multitasking, multi-user system; it can do more than one thing at once.

I don't need yet-another system to keep updated.

> You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now

I don't need to do that. I can just watch films locally, or over my LAN. (But if/when I decide that I do want to do that, then: Plex is not particularly arduous to set up.)

> Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.

Will it? The same hardware that transcodes to h.264 and h.265 today will still do so tomorrow. If that's good enough for today, then it will still be good enough tomorrow.

I suppose that I might outgrow a hard drive or decide to trim back power consumption, or something. But I won't have to get a new box for movie duties just because time has passed.

And as a realistic construct: I'll be updating my desktop rig because of things like GUI frameworks becoming intolerably huge and inefficient, not because its paltry few server-roles have grown untenable.

> Even for technical people this is a pain over time.

Is it? I think I've probably spent more time writing this comment than I have on maintaining this stuff over the past couple of years. Keeping it up and running is a pretty lazy thing.

> Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.

We don't know if any of these optical formats will last 50+ years, even with the best of storage. We haven't yet had consumer optical media for films for 50 years (though laserdisc is getting very close).

On one hand: We had marketing promises of perfection that would last forever, and some of those promises were even backed by sciencey-data like results from accelerated aging.

On the other hand: Even though it sure would be nice if it didn't exist, we do have disc rot. It takes different forms and each of those forms are real. Disc rot can affect things even if they've been stored properly.

And if I buy a Blu-Ray disc today and it does last for 50 years, will I still be able to buy a player for it that works in 2076?

Meanwhile: It sure is easier to space-shift the contents of some hard drives than it is a few thousand optical disks. One of these is just a well-structured command that takes as long as it takes to complete, and the other is Real Work -- even if "space shifting" means just boxing them up and loading them onto a truck.

>Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.

I know. The little watchdog process on the NAS sees that it's 10 years old, and locks it so it won't work anymore. So annoying.

Or do you mean that you will have so many movies and shows that you yearn for more storage? Because these two things aren't the same. The latter is "this is so good, I want more of it". It's like telling someone to subsist on pumpkin seeds and rainwater because if they eat anything more flavorful they'll become gluttonous.

>Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.

There are no commercial disks that last that long, and no one can properly store them. Cold, dark, climate-controlled, pure nitrogen atmosphere? Give me a break. And how many can you even store?