I have tried to solve this many times as I want to regularly back up my Google content - mostly the images for the same purpose you mention.

Unfortunately there is no good solution I’ve ever come up with or found. I even looked into scripting with something like puppeteer. It requires regular confirmation of your authentication and I just haven’t found a good way to solve that since there’s no API access. It also won’t let you use any cli tools like wget. You could probably figure out how to pull some token or cookie to give to the cli but you’d have to do it so often that its more of a pain than just manually downloading.

My solution currently is to run a firefox browser in a container on my server to download them. It acts as sort of a session manager (like tmux or zellij for command line) so that if the PC I’m using goes to sleep or something, the downloads continue. Then I just check in occasionally through the day. Plus I wanted them on the server anyway, at the end of the day. Downloading them there directly saves me having to then transfer to the server.

Switching to .tgz will let you make up to 50GB files which at least means fewer iterations and longer time between interactions (so I can actually do something useful in the meantime).

I sincerely hope someone proves me wrong and has a way to do this but I’ve searched a lot. I know other people want to solve it but I’ve never seen anyone with a solution.

I use Lidarr. I know its primary purpose is downloading but if you just never configure those parts, it can do all the renaming, folder organization, and metadata tagging. It uses MusicBrainz primarily, iirc. You can also configure scripts to run it through beets or other tools too.

There’s no perfect solution for this because music metadata is a lot more complicated than movies or tv. But Lidarr gets pretty close to set-and-forget.

I’ve also tried MusicBrainz Picard with pretty decent results but I found it sort of suffered from the problems you described for your current system.

There’s a lot of comments talking about used and refurbs. I personally use these types to get good deals but I also have a reasonably robust backup protocol. Not a full 321 backup but an appropriate level of risk for my needs.

My point being, if you go that route, they’re cheaper but the odds that one dies on you might be higher. Make sure you manage your backup strategy to a risk value you’re comfortable with.

That said, I’ve also had great experiences with serverpartdeals. I’ve also used diskprices.com to find deals.

Things to consider are noise, temps, power-on time, etc. For myself, temps are fairly consistent in my case and it’s in a closet so I don’t care about noise. I also don’t need particularly fast access on the HDDs (I use an nvme cache strategy as well) so I can pretty much use whatever. Your needs might differ.

I understand the frustration; almost nowhere does agile “right”. However, this is a gross misrepresentation of the philosophy.

Specifically it leaves out and ignores this very important part:

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

As seen on agilemanifesto.org

The base philosophy is meant to remind us what we are here to do: make software (or whatever project we’re working on), not become dogmatic about processes or tools or get bogged down in peripheral documentation.