YT videos get taken down for any reason these days - fake copyright claims, hacking or just the creator getting fed up with YT’s policies. Entire channels vanish with no warning. Valuable videos that generate income suddenly become private only. It is not an open platform, it’s a monetised platform first and foremost.

If you have these videos under your control, then if they’re no longer watchable online, you still have them. That’s exactly what TA is for and does a superb job of. Basically every YT video I watch that I think is useful, I hit the Save button. Some of them are indeed no longer available. I have entire channels downloading so if the creator does close up shop, at least I’ve got their latest.

Obviously you need a lot of storage space - mine is over 5TB and growing. But it’s worth it.

Also, it avoids the YT before, mid and after ads.

I basically throw every YT video I watch into TubeArchivist. The browser extension makes this a single click. Currently have over 5TB of YT videos saved, including whole channels.

See comment above yours.

This. With a proper backup strategy, you are reducing the probability of a catastrophic sequence of events. It becomes P(some unlikely event) x P(some other unlikely event) x … Etc. for as many events you can think of and/or can afford to mitigate.

As you say, the risk will never be zero. And even the best-laid plans can fail - the Gitlab incident a few years back saw five layers of backups and disaster preparedness fail.

Really, all you can do is backup your data using standard methods, and TEST THE RESTORE before you need to rely on it!

If you don’t need to access it much and just want to archive it, tape is probably a contender.

Some consumer drives aren’t well suited to continuous use - they’re designed and rated for only a few hours a day. Heat and vibration tolerances are lower. I wore out some WD Greens that way - they were throwing errors by 60k hours.

NAS drives are the opposite, they’re designed to run 24/7. In the same way, enterprise drives are designed for better vibration tolerance to be crammed in a chassis with many other spinning disks.

Basically they’ll work, but longevity is an issue, which is particularly relevant to us hoarders. I use WD Reds in my NAS and enterprise/SAS drives in my servers now. Seems to be a good combination.

Motherboard, CPU and RAM - no problem at all (more accurately, problems are easy to spot with diagnostics and they shouldn’t wear out).

Chassis - a bit of a wild card. The backplane in one of my systems is faulty.

PSUs - ideally new.

HDDs - almost all of mine are secondhand. Enterprise- or NAS-grade drives should have many years of life left. Ideally buy new to benefit from warranty but my experience has been great.

SSDs - nope. Buy new. I bought some secondhand Samsung SSDs and they developed problems, both threw IO errors after a few weeks. SSDs are cheap enough not to bother with secondhand.

Everything else I bought used, including the rack. In fact, the only things I bought new in my entire homelab are my router and WiFi AP.