Entertainment is going to be critical in a SHTF scenario. There may be countless hours when you have nothing to do but stare at the wall. I was thinking it would be good to have a massive amount of entertainment data stored on an external hard drive to occupy this time. I was playing around with the idea of purchasing a 100TB external hard drive off of amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZVP6B3L/?tag=survivalmonke-20 Then putting up a craigslist ad to see if I could find someone who has a massive amount of entertainment data that I could download to it. Tons of TV series (Breaking Bad, Ozark, Two and a Half Men, ect). Also movies and documentaries. If I could find someone with this amount of data, I would pay them to transfer it over. One concern is that I would need to make sure that there is no explicit/illegal data getting transferred over. You don't know who you're dealing with if you just find a random person off of craigslist or something. Has anyone else gone down this road? If so, any pitfalls? Better approach? I'm assuming there will be no internet streaming in a grid down scenario, hence the need for locally installed entertainment on an external hard drive.
if it's a true SHTF situation. You won't have time to be lounging around. You'll be doing everything to stay alive. keeping yourself hydrated, fed, warm and dry will basically be consuming your day. The only way i can see that one would have hours upon hours of idle time is if: You have wells, creeks, water catchment to store years of water. Food stock piles and a garden with a gardener on staff. Fuel (propane, firewood, diesel) stored for long term outages. Could be years. and a house that is tornado, hurricane, termite, fire and earthquake proof that requires no maintenance. Oh and a full time protection staff to keep what is yours ... well yours. things break, things need tending, things aren't going to go smoothly.
We have all of our favorite music on hard drive and have our favorite movies/series on DVD/Blue Ray. Lost count of the movies but they fill 3 walls of floor to ceiling shelving.
Never have been too keen on wasting time on movies or tv...took twenty years to average a movie per decade I've always trended toward educational material...and those I do have on hand.
You can get a lot of classic movies and TV series by torrent. It's legal so long as they are old enough that you aren't violating copyrights. In many cases it's the only way to find them. Same goes for music. I do have a huge collection of music and movies on my NAS. It's fairly easy, but time consuming, to rip them from CD's, DVD's, and Blu-Rays. It is legal to make copies of media you own for your own purposes. You can also legally download them from torrent IF you already own the media which is quicker.
Entertainment is not for me. I will certainly be extremely busy. It's for elderly folks I'd be taking care of. They go bonkers if they're not glued to a tube 24/7. Really, it's a way to keep them out of my hair, while I get stuff done.
Yes. I used to have friends in college who had tons of downloads. Music, tv, movies, ect. I was looking for one of those type of folks to see if I could download all of their hard work from them. I don't have the time to download all that stuff individually. I'm looking for someone with a massive entertainment library that they'd be willing to share... happy to pay a fee.
Looking that NAS over (in your link) 100TB is only if you make it JBOD so no redundancy - if one disk fails you got zipadeedoodah. As RAID 5 you can store 80TB, which is still HUGE with redundancy. My NAS is a mere (by comparison) 18TB and I have about 40% free space. Next up is who makes the hard drives and what is the MTBF? Not all hard drives are created equal and are these optimized for NAS or general purpose? WD, Seagate, Toshiba, or some off brand Chinese? Who makes this NAS and what is their track record? If a Chinese company, what is the chance they have their hand up your skirt? Mine is Netgear, who got out of the business a few years back, but still provides firmwear updates and I still get TREND antivirus updates. I'd really look at the available NAS chassis and select based on the track record of the company, their commitment to the future and market share and then populate with my choice of disks. I'd also look at rack mount vs Bookshelf/desktop. My core equipment is all rack mount. Stuff like earthquakes happen, and a secure, properly grounded chassis and enclosure are important, IMO. Next, consider enough UPS to allow you to gracefully shut it down in the event of an outage. Even my smaller 6TB drives took about a day each to sync when I upgraded from 3TB drives. Imagine 5 20TB drives trying to get their heads straight after a power bump!
Yeah I don't plan on hanging around in a city and I expect to see very few people should things go sideways. There will be a lot of free time once I get a bit older but also the kids and friends like entertainment so I have some redundant media servers. There is a good library of DVDs and VHS but that being said, you can't get everything you want at a store. I've heard some people use a VPN, thepiratebay.org, and torrenting software such as utorrent to get the old media they can't find anywhere else. I'm not a lawyer so I wont comment on the legalities of this but I heard it works.
People as early as Genesis had music, Entertainment is as old as mankind, no animal on this planet makes rhythmic music but man. I anticipated this in my preps and have a VHS library of about 1500 movies and another 1200 DVD collection,, However no electronic recordings. I also have 78 and 33&1/3 RPM records as well as wind up record players. An abundance of tape players and music as well as instruments; sax clarinet, piano, organ, trombone, trumpet, drums , tambourines, guitars, ect..and a small collection of sheet music. Through out time man daughter the need for diversions, better music than darker activities. My particular tastes in music date back to the 1930, on average, the only modern music I choose to listen to is smooth jazz, and I am very selective with that as well. Even Christian music I have some strict preferences with, my tastes don’t follow an artist , the words hold greater interest, but instrumentals are better to concentrate on work with. An harmonica is an excellent tool for camping even sitting alone, no one but you care if you get the melody right. You can play it as softly or as loud as you like. Think about it, if you were lost it might be a good way to make your self obvious if there are searchers in the area. It would certainly help pass the time in place of fear and stress. It has been observed that some animals are actually attracted to certain forms of music, I have to wonder what the parameters are?
Lots of musics, ebooks and regular books. I am not big on regular tv or movies but I do love hallmark channel movies so I could get a bunch of those!
Thanks for this information. What is JBOD? RAID 5 you can store 80TB <- 80 TB is good. Is RAID 5 a brand? What is MTBF? <- I agree. I'm sketched out a little with Western Digital. I think a lot of these external hard drives today try to build in cloud storage, which I do not want. I also don't want wireless internet connection capabilities because that invites these companies to spy on activities. Apricon and Ironkey make good secure ex hds, but I'm not sure what size storage is available. Actually, I should look that up...
Yes, I'm probably F'ed when it comes to SHTF scenario. I'm stuck in the suburbs between 2 cities. I'm trying to make the most of it. I don't have the $$ to get a country retreat unfortunately, which probably means I'll be toast. I try anyway!
Wow. Apricorn only goes up to 18TB and they want 1200 for it. Geez. Aegis Padlock DT FIPS - USB 3.0 Desktop Drive
JBOD = Just a Bunch Of Disks, it simply joins them into one big virtual disk. One disk fails and you lost the whole thing. MTBF = Mean Time Between Failure, basically the typical time you can expect the disk to operate before it needs replacement. RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There are several types of RAID, but RAID 5 is the most commonly used after simple disk mirroring (RAID 1). In RAID 5 all data is striped across each disk with parity information so if one disk fails the data is still secure by use of the parity on the remaining drives. This allows you to replace a failed disk without losing data. You can also set aside a standby disk to automatically take over for a failed disk, but you lose another disk worth of data capacity. For example, RAID 5 in a 5 bay NAS with 20TB drives you can store 4 x 20TB = 80TB of data. With a standby drive you reduce capacity since you would have 3 x 20TB = 60TB of data. I'd suggest straight RAID 5 but have one spare on hand to hot swap when needed, because eventually you will. Explanation of RAID and RAID levels here: RAID - Wikipedia
You are not paying for the storage. You are paying for the encryption and rubber hose compromise safeguard. wipe upon x number of invalid password attempts rubber hose compromise, they are beating you until you give them the password .. and the device is wiped. very secure. you don't have the pin, you are not getting in.
