I store everything that I pull, my aim is to be a Netflix replacement for my family. Just have whatever you want to watch at the snap of your fingers or doom scroll until you find something.

How I get more content? Easy, I don’t. I have a telegram bot that my user can request additional content from. Usually my users have good taste so I just watch whatever they pull.

If you want to automate look into the "Wikiarr" but to answer your question I think many of us are just data hoarders. I try to delete stuff I've watched but I also tend to keep stuff that I've had trouble finding good versions of. I am also building a large music library (currently around 200-250gb) and that's entirely around avoiding crappy streaming services. Most of this collection I either already owned (used to rip ipods id repair for people) or used soulseek/other tools to build.

Personally I'd replace that 10 year old drive as it's probably limited on remaining life even if only lightly used.

Usually what happens is a simple set up of a laptop with Kodi and a 1tb external drive turn into a hobby and you end up with huge NAS set ups with docker stacks. It's so much less about about the actual content and more about the hobby. At least for me it's become that.

Offline access is a must. Don't rely on others to store stuff for you

Finding stuff to watch:

Honestly:
Ads on Youtube

Besides that: Reddit r/movies, random posters I see in day to day IRL or online or with NZB360 (which utilizes Trakt and TMDB)

Storing stuff:

7TB external HDD plugged into an Intel NUC acting as a makeshift NAS with OMV.
What I store is mostly what is of interest.
Movie: ~ 3.3TiB (419 movies)
Anime and TV: ~2.7TiB (133 shows total)

I have currently about 500GiB free storage and if I am ever short on something I will delete what I deem unworthy to keep or not worth the quality (like a 1080p BluRay instead of a 4K Remux)

What I keep:

• Hard to aquire
• Favorites
• Rewatchable stuff like short cartoons

Initially it was just using overseerr and letting everyone that use my server just request what they wanted. I would also just explore overseerr once in awhile to see whats new.

Now though, I have several lists configured in both radarr and sonarr that are made by mdblist that will add the latest popular films/shows. Due to this usually I can just check my server and I'll already have either the show or the movie without doing anything.

Justwatch.com

See what's trending, check the score. Is it streamable? If no. It's stealable.

I have Jellyseerr set up so that I and my friends can request things that will automatically get pulled down. It also has trending and upcoming content, so I sometimes find stuff there. Also, generally, I just see/hear people talking about stuff and want to check it out.

I had 2TB of space when I got my NAS, and that was more than enough for my lab, until I started downloading media. Then I bumped it to 4TB and then recently 12TB.

I want to have content for myself and my users. I will occasionally delete things if I don't think anyone else will want to watch it and I won't want to rewatch it. That's usually nothingy action flicks.

I'm just a data hoarder who likes to re-watch things.

I've been building my collection for about 15 years or so. It adds up, and thats after a few hdd failures too.

A lot of the new stuff I download I don't actually watch right away, I wait for lulls in programming(such as a writers strike) to binge watch them.

Also I like old movies (the Marx Brothers, etc.)and old, hard to find TV shows (still looking for Strange Luck from the 90s).

What is easy to find today could be difficult tomorrow. Also original versions could be lost or edited to be more PC and the original stops being sold or streamed.

Disney is removing media from its service for tax breaks. Game servers go offline all of the time making lots of games fully or partially unplayable. Bungie deletes dlc that people have paid for and I'm sure others will be able to chime in with more examples.... The point is it better to save it if its important to you.

Typically I'll check IMDb for the More like this section and go from there. It's how I found out about Jeff and Some Aliens and The Life and Times of Tim.

Some media is also hard to come by so people might fear deleting content that might not be easy to get back in the future.

Look at all the semi-lost media where there's only a segment of it that exists on YouTube

I have a seedbox on which I store stuff but I just stream everything from real debrid.

For new content, I check daily:

• trending torrents categories (movies, tv packs) on a few public trackers to see what people are watching
• check the "what's on tv tonight" recommendations on the guardian uk website
• I use trakt tv for recommendations

I have 50TB of capacity, 30TB used, for Movies and Shows (mostly movies). I get maximum quality 4K Blu-ray rips called Remuxes. For 4K they can be as large as 110GB each movie but never lower than 25GB.

Where I find it is private (torrent) trackers. These places are utopic is what they have available to download and organized to find everything super easy, and the trackers I'm with have a good community and we all talk and hang out in the IRC chat.

That really depends on how you treat the media you download. Is it just a temp buffer that you delete after watching or is it a collection you grow and curate over time.

I don't have a big NAS but it's easy to fill a bunch of hard drives. I was born in the 80s which means that I want to watch a lot of comedies and action movies from the 70s (old stuff), 80s (childhood), and 90s ("teenagehood"). Also a lot of current movies because there is a lot of good stuff (I watched the Dune 2021 with my wife and we both agreed that it's fucking awesome, there are a billion good movies out there). I only have a thousand movies but it's already weighing more than 1 TB (each movie is 1 GB in 1080p because I don't want 4K stuff on my shitty TV). Most of those movies are what I consider "good movies" that I want to watch again in the future, the same way people had VHS libraries in the 80s.

Now add TV shows. Each TV show has approximately 20 episodes for 10 seasons. It's an additional 3 or 4 TB of stuff that I may want to watch in the future. You can easily get a few interesting TV shows whatever your preferences are. Any kind of video that you may want to watch twice in the future. For example, I always wanted to watch the X-files when I was younger but I didn't had the time to do it. All the X-files episodes add 80 GB on my NAS. South Park: 50 GB, Bewitched (1964-1972, yes, I love that old stuff): 80 GB!

Also don't forget cartoons (I have 500 GB of cartoons and anime), it can be big.

Music is a smaller issue because I compress everything from FLAC to the Opus codec at high quality and, while the files may be small, it still counts. Every album weighs 100 MB, a discography is 1 GB. If you like a hundred artists, you have 100 GB of additional data.

As for finding stuff, I don't use Sonarr or stuff like this, I only note what I remember from the past (or new movies) and get it later from TPB.

Honestly, a terabyte can be filled up pretty quicky just with video games. High resolution films add up quicker than you think.

The library is good if you have the hardware to rip.

Not to mention stuff from the Internet Archive, which has all the things you definitely have never seen. It is nearly bizarre the gems one can find in the public domain.

I've only got a out 1.5tb but if I ditched Netflix I'd need to download 10+ shows with hundreds of episodes. I've already got a few 6+ season shows on my Plex but it's mostly 1-2 season newer shows because everything has segregated so much in the past few years. If you don't have Disney+ and want to see all the marvel shit, it's adding up quick. It's not like I'm rewatching all this stuff, I have 300 movies and rewatch one or two maybe once a year. I just keep everything because it's not very expensive to me. If I need more space I'll drop £100 and have storage for the next 5+ years.

Then there's the people who download 25gb 4k movies and shit, I will occasionally but I don't like to do it.

Letterboxd.

And space is a bit funny because you don’t always know how much space is taken by redundancy.

I really don't do much pirating anymore. I have a terabyte that's almost full that I've been curating for around seven years. I have my collection of favorite films and movies that I just rewatch all the time. For new stuff, just have a folder full of bookmarks to pirate streaming sites. I used to do Kodi add-ons for streaming, but that got to be a pain in the ass.