memes

Don't get me wrong - I am super sentimental, and can really get lost going down memory lane. I spend probably most of my mental life living in the past. But yeah, I guess the stuff I do preserve (99% text) just doesn't take up much room at all.

yes and when that source is there, everyone who downloads it gets it for free and that's bad!

then the new people who have it can help others get it for free and that's also bad!

proton VPN, mullvad VPN, iVPN...and even shitty Torguard's proxy service can be helpful...not the VPN though, their VPN is fast, but it leaks and even when they're shown that it leaks they'll tell you it isn't happening just because you used a tester they didn't know about...which is why you shouldn't use those...they allow you to safely download things without paying...that would be bad!

don't connect through proxies based in countries where it's legal to do that either! that would be even worse to do!

To be fair, RAID is not backup for itself but if they have their stuff on a computer and then sync it to a NAS RAID then that's backup.

I went M-Disc. Need a special burner and disks cost me $30NZD each or about $18USD for 100GB.

They are write once (I fucked up two early on) but they should last 100+ years. I burnt about 1TB, and made two copies (one for offsite storage). It was not cheap.

A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.

Expanding ZFS is painful and it's wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.

ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.

If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.

The L2-arc cache and SLOG don't do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They're easy to take off though.

Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what's good enough and live with it.

I switched to raid z2 from a 6 drive mirror and what an ordeal that was. It's because I had to grow into it and buy drives over time but eventually the mirror was too inefficient.

I moved data around like 5 times all because I still didn't have enough disks to build my new array and keep my data on the system at the same time. And expanding raidz expands parity on all disks but not the data so you have to recopy all your data so it stripes fully.

I had a backup on a DAS but USB is slow and I didn't want to have it be the only copy.

Edit: clarifying my point. I have no regrets. ZFS is awesome. But make the important decisions up front and yes start with the right amount of drives that you need. My whole issue was growing into it and having to make changes after the fact.

A RAID is essentially a way to have multiple "hard drives" connected in a way that looks as if it's one drive so you can have a ton of storage.

A NAS is a sort of like a remote storage device. Not quite a PC, but more than just a storage drive.

Not sure how you'd go about doing any of that with a MacBook.

NAS stands for "Network Attached Storage", basically a computer whose sole purpose is storing and serving files in your home.

RAID stands for "Reduntant Array of Inexpensive Disks", and is broadly a way to merge multiple disks into one.
RAID 0 means that files are evenly distributed on all disks, which improves IO speed and extends a file system (≈ a partition) 's capacity, but it's useless against disk failure;
RAID 1(mirroring) means that all disks have the same data as a sort of real-time backup, and as long as one disk remains functional, all the other disks can fail without the data becoming inaccessible;
other RAID levels use clever math to offer a mix of the first two, spreading files among disks (like RAID 0) but still tolerating failures of a small number of disks (like RAID 1 but way less redundant).

Wikipedia has a less abridged explaination on its RAID page.