Human error is the biggest factor.

You edit a file, do you directly copy it over? Probably not, so when is it time to copy over? Maybe you remember maybe you don’t.

Ohh you Deleted a File? Did you delete it on the other one aswell? No, well now we get into the rabbit hole of dependencies.

Sure you may be able to automate it via Rsync. But how often? once a day? once a month? what happens if a Drive writes faulty data and does not tell you? Well now you copied it over in the hopes it is not broken.

You want to retrive a file because you accidentially deleted it, well that file has been sitting there a long time, its corrupted now. But it has never told you it is and you have no redundancy to correct errors.

Theres many more reasons just copying it is not a good Idea those are just some examples. Theres also Raid soulutions to accommodate mixed drive sizes like Unraid does. And yes it costs money but with Snapraid and Merger FS you can do the same thing for free.

Sure it maybe more effort but the question should be how much is your data worth and are you able to lose it? And what does it cost you to get it back again.

Not to be rude or anything, but External RAIDs individual to the user is not really a solid soulution. It may work for 1-2 People working on one project at a time. But it just does not scale. What if someone needs to acces files of that project? they move the raid or plug their laptop on a differen workspace? Not really a great soulution IMO.

Like you say in the last part having a NAS with maybe a bit of room to grow sso 100TB might be the best option that way everyone can access the data and work accross projects. And more importantly it would offer work from a different place in the office or even work from home.

Yea with tape the compressed nr are very missleading. Thats a best case scenario where the files compress 2:1 with TAR+gzip which it literallly never does. Bestcase I have seen was 1.2:1 on a folder consisting of config files. Basically nothing nowdays is compressable you will interact with, except textfiles depending on format. So its best to always asume the raw space as the space you get

From what it sounds you want a NAS and Tape Archive.

So get a device which holds your working Projects, you mentioned arount 20-40TB which is no problem nowdays. Can be done for under 1k with of the shelf stuff.

And Tape backup for stuff you dont need regularly. Maybe chose an older generation of LTO I would look for something that can hold about 1 Project per Tape or the likes of it. LTO5 is pretty cheap used, ca be had for 500 Bucks but is only 1.5TB per tape.

Disclaimer, with LTO never look at the compressed NR, its for compressable data only which video is not. Thus with LTO9 you will only get 18TB

Why not go with a constant quality setting in the encoder instead of bitrate and filesize limitations?.

Thats what I do I feel CQ of 18 is indistiguishable from the original.

Bonus TIP when transcoding for static Use like storing and filesize reduction. always use a CPU never a GPU if you are after smallest filesize.

Well ddns is just dns which get auto updated via helper script which you can do yourself on your own domain aswell. So yes Point still stands. And a domain which is yours might still be nicer than a bottom of the barrle subdomain. Of which you often also don’t get unlimited

SSD is not archival storage. The NAND needs Power or it will lose its charge over time. Maybe not in one to 2 Years but maybe in 5-10.

If its active yes hdds are still cheaper unless you need less then 10tb

Yes, because how will you acces wireguard? Whats your endpoint?

I mean its all fine if you have a static IP which never changes but that usually is not the case anymore. So you need a domainname to update. Also vpn.youlab.tld is esier to remember than 131.234.142.83

I mean this is too litle info. What IP exactly? one v6? one Legacy IP? also HDD storage? bruh…Whatabout SLAs? RAM CPU?

Datasecurity? Redundancy?

Even if its a friend I would avoid it.