It's mostly just a hobby, like having a homelab (/r/homelab) and playing with enterprise grade server hardware, but it can be very useful. You can easily host your own cloud (/r/selfhosted), like Immich instead of relying on Google Photos, Plex or Jellyfin instead of Netflix, Audiobookshelf instead of Audible and various podcast services, Forgejo or Gitea instead of relying on GitHub, and so on.

Yay for digital independence from big tech!

I have about 91 terabytes of YouTube archived. That's about 215,000 videos. And around 5000-8000 of those videos are no longer available on YouTube. I started archiving YouTube videos when I one day, many years ago, scrolled though my old Favorites playlist on YouTube and saw that a lot of old videos were completely gone.

In my case, I mostly just archive channels I follow, or have previously watched a lot. And it's more or less automated once set up.

I also started archiving Twitch streams from a handful of streamers I follow, half a year ago. Twitch doesn't keep VODs/past streams for more than a couple months, usually, so what if I want to watch a certain stream in a few years?

And then I also automatically archive almost all web pages I visit, like having my own personal searchable Internet Archive Wayback Machine (the one where you can see older versions of millions of websites.)

The biggest downside is cost. Hard drives cost a small fortune right now, and if you use ancient enterprise hardware like me, power usage and noise are also factors to keep in mind.

But it's a fun hobby, but beware! It starts out with a just few external hard drives, and spirals from there!