Most of my storage is media - movies and series. Immich, Nextcloud and personal files take little less than 300GB. I do backups weekly to NAS storage, monthly to storage SSD in my PC and to an external HDD. I am looking into way to somehow be able to backup to a rpi3 that I have installed at my father's place. This might cover my 3-2-1 needs, just need to figure out that 1.

Drives have always been more expensive where I live due to taxes and extra "pirate taxes" they stick on anything you can store data on. But now they are even worse, so sad. $589 for 16TB Toshiba N300 was the cheapest "new" ones I could find at a glance.

Cant. My nas is weak and cant run unraid. Raid5 and Raid6 is what I can achieve.

Punch cards are cheap.

I run on dual Xeon R410s with 128Gb of RAM (2013?). Got them for free, on Kijiji. Runs Proxmox on both and a pile of VMs. Dual GB nics, 6 SAS bays, HBA in IT mode for ZFS. Has iLo for OOB management, or whatever the Dell equivalent is.

I mean, it's not fast, but each server has 24 cores and I can chunk PDF files fairly quickly for RAG on 10 cores and have plenty for mail server, Nextcloud, K8S running some side hustle apps, etc, etc. Kind of a noisy prick when it winds up though.