The "Just in Case" Disease

It starts with a 1TB external drive. "Backups," you say.

Then you get a NAS. Synology. TrueNAS. Unraid.

Suddenly you are cruising eBay at 3 AM looking for refurbished Enterprise SAS drives. You are learning about ZFS pools. You are worrying about "Bit Rot."

Why?

Because streaming services delete things. Games get delisted. The internet is impermanent.

So we become the librarians of the apocalypse.

But Do We Actually Use It?

No.

I have 4,000 movies on my Plex server. I watch The Office on Netflix.

I have the entire source code for Android 4.0. Why? I don't know.

The act of collecting is the dopamine hit. The having is the point. Not the using.

The Cost of Forever

Electricity isn't free. Hard drives die.

My "free" archive costs me about $40/month in power and amortized hardware failure.

But compare that to:

• Netflix ($20)
• Spotify ($15)
• Dropbox ($15)
• Google Drive ($10)

Maybe... just maybe... I'm breaking even? (I'm not).

Conclusion

We are building arks.

When the internet goes dark, or gets paywalled, or gets flooded with AI slop... we will have the originals.

We will have the 1080p rips of movies from 1999. We will have the raw MP3s.

We are the crazy people on the mountain. And one day, you might need us.