As it should be, don’t do that.

Doctor, when I do this it hurts…

Also, you’re creating a disk image…

Thanks for that, worth knowing.

True, but OP refers to ‘some cherished items’

I assumed the context here was torrenting rather than streaming, download blu-ray remuxes and encode to your liking.

A 16Tb manufacturer recertified drive is USD160 which should sort storage (and later get a second for offline backup). I’m actually holding out until I get GPU encode (apparently CPU is somewhat better, but power considerations, maybe next gen). Do wish the scene would get on with switching, though, are we dinosaurs?

RetroArch doesn’t have Xbox/PS2/switch

No, but EmuDeck does, along with RetroArch… Best have a look before starting.

More power to you if you want to strike out on your own, but you may find it quicker going to join a larger project at this stage, you’ll have people to ask questions to, if you choose well you’ll learn best (or good) practices, etc. Maybe EmuDeck itself? In the end the language doesn’t matter much (maybe avoid Perl, PHP and JavaScript at the start), once you get the concepts down it’s easy to switch to another. You’ve got time, take some to skill up.

Absitively, use case here IMO is set and forget autoupdate to stay current and SELinux (which actually reduces surface)

K, I asked for that apparently, well played…

Was talking github stars though.

Learn to read code (git gud) /s but it’s the only way to be sure (nuke from orbit)

Or, look at the stars…

The Most Exciting Phrase in Science Is Not ‘Eureka!’ But ‘That’s Odd!’

For a media server speed matters little (5400rpm is plenty), if you’ve only got one drive, warranty is king. Thing is you shouldn’t only have one drive, drives will fail, and warranty doesn’t get your data back, so you plan for it. At the very least, you should look at getting an offline backup as soon as possible, now you don’t care if your drive fails and can get the cheapest ones. Ideally, you also set up a RAID5 (or Unraid, or mergerfs+SnapRAID) on your server, now you just get a replacement drive and rebuild. Remember RAID is not a backup, it doesn’t protect against accidental deletions for example, so you still want the offline backup.

Also, don’t sleep on manufacturer recertified drives, as long as you have a backup they’re significantly more cost-effective.

TLDR: set yourself up so that a drive failing is not a problem.

Nah, I’m suggesting you actually use some human agency. I’ve found it pleasing, a couple of hours can often net thousands of hours of listening time. You’ve got a list to start from, why not give it a go ?

While I love the *arrs for video, I found Lidarr pretty damn awful, perhaps it’s OK with usenet but not torrent without specialised private trackers. Anywho, I found the Soulseek network, spiritual successor to Napster, which has most of everything, usually at high bitrate, and take pleasure hand curating a personal library. I like the Nicotine client. There’s so much more music than video that it makes sense to be choosy, I’m my own personal DJ…

I was here to say the same as pezhore, separating storage and compute is almost as important as separating church and state. Muck around, break things, have fun, all the while your data is safe (don’t forget offline backups though). The MS-01 is a fine looking box, but any old NUC / SFF will do for your purposes (modern AMD cpu or a graphics card if you need / want plex transcode).

Edit to add, old laptops are great compute nodes (maybe moreso from my ex corporate thinkpad laptop bias, but still)…

Or… install bazzite on one or both… and use an Arch distrobox to get all the Arch/AUR goodness with none of the system breaking risks. I was on Arch for a few years, learned a lot, but as a first distro ? Your funeral…

So, by way of answering my own question, I found this map, which lets you work it out for yourself. Interesting stuff.

Which brings me to the question of how to benchmark now that I can make good guesses. Speedtest to US and Europe?

ETA: For those that follow, what I did was spin up multiple gluetun instances, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, hook them to firefox with FoxyProxy (different ports, duh) and compare speeds on https://librespeed.org/. Bottom line was the bottleneck was my ISP (surprise!!)

Still, I suspect there are ways to leverage crap internet to useful torrenting.

I’d be going through Singapore to get to Japan, so I doubt that’d be better… Hmm maybe, after looking at the map, it might actually work out better, depends on how saturated the direct cable is I guess.

Time Bandits is great so far and does justice to the original.

Umbrella Academy final season just dropped, wacky fun, also time travel among other stuff.

The Dragon Prince also dropped a new season, beautiful (in multiple ways) animated story.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End : Slice of life anime with interesting thoughts on immortality and a great feel.

Exploding Kittens pulled it together by the end.

If you missed Scavengers Reign, how 'bout don’t :)

Serenity, Wash. (too soon ? :)

Or violence, which is justified self-defense when tyrants are trying to destroy everyone’s property rights.

Valid option. Burn it all down and start again is always possible, and probably more efficient than fixing things at this point.