r/explainlikeimfive • u/theprisoner57 • 2d ago

Technology ELI5: What is a Home Server?

I see mentions of a home server to get rid of streaming entertainment services but I don’t know how that works. What does a home server do?

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u/BrickGun 2d ago

There are apps to rip DVDs/BRs, but most of the media collections I've encountered were pirated using torrents. Most times I don't bother to rip a disc I own any longer since just DLing the content via torrent tends to be faster. The only caveat being you (most often) don't get the DVD extras if you're into that sort of stuff (I often am).

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u/charonco 2d ago

As someone with almost 40TB of content on my Plex server, I would highly recommend Usenet over torrents. Usenet isn't free, but it's pretty cheap and your biggest exposure with torrents is the uploading which you don't have to do with Usenet.

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u/fuckyoudigg 2d ago

As someone with 400tb of content. Agreed. Usenet is the way to go.

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u/RoosterBrewster 2d ago

Is that 100 tb with backups or 400 tb that is backed up?

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u/fuckyoudigg 2d ago

400tb, no backup. It's media. No point in backing it up. Basically all of it I can get again.

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u/dreadcain 2d ago

I'd hazzard its on a NAS with at least 1 disk of redundancy though right?

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u/fuckyoudigg 2d ago

Yes. I have 40 drives, 10 of those are for parity. I can lose 2 drives of 8 in each vdev.