Advice: Stay safe doing it and do your research!
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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Asklemmy
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People are suggesting Jellyfin which is a great solution for media like music, movies, etc. If you want to have offline copies of large knowledge repositories, like Wikipedia etc, look into Kiwix.
Kiwix is a GPLv3 offline web browser. It allows offline access to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation projects, Stack Overflow communities, as well as public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and various other large, data collections. These collections are usually 100s of MB in size, downloadable with a single click, and searchable.
The Kiwix Library of available collections:
(Homepage: https://kiwix.org/)
[ Not in Fdroid yet. Can be installed via Obtainium ]
Recommended collections:
Phet Interactive Science Simulations,
BookDash children's books,
Blender open movies.
One piece of advice, backup that flash drive. Flash drives are not reliable storage.
Beyond that, I'm doing much the same thing for much the same reason. I'm a couple of terabytes ahead of you, though.
I wound up putting everything on a NAS and setting up remote access through Tailscale.
Yeah, I heard flash drives are crap. I'm thinking of using them as disposables to transfer data from one device to another in the face of trackers and stuff, and then destroying the flash drive. I'm not sure if that's a good practice though.
Passive data cannot track you. Even if you have a program with a nefarious virus on the drive. As long as you're not executing it it cannot harm you.
An irrelevant practice perhaps. Once you have the media and have stripped any DRM trackers arenβt generally a worry anymore, at least not from the media files. Other software on your system may be another question entirely.
Might ask around in !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com as to best practices, as they are generally pretty privacy oriented by necessity.
I think you are in the wrong community there are dedicated ones.
Checkout selfhosted on Lemmy world or piracy on db0
I like to keep a copy of what I like, and I like to have it accessible too.
Yes, I asked the question in the wrong place, there are just more people here...
The community is called ask Lemmy. Not only ask certain questions. I think it's fine.
Recently started doing something similar at a larger order of magnitude. I would say Kiwix and RetroArch are a must. I learned Kodi is the most finicky piece of shit media program ever written (im being hyperbolic, I use it daily but wish that some settings were more intuitive). I also learned about FAT vs NTFS after spending days trying to download an 80gb file just to find that I needed to reformat the drive from FAT to NTFS. also don't sleep on archive.org and the fact that you can use wget to mass download collections or search results.
I have about 60TB of storage on my Media server that I use for plex (I would recommend jellyfin for new users, but I have a lifetime premium). Now I would never pirate but if I did there's Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr and Jackett to make that all a click and go situation.
Jackett is old school.
The new kids use prowlarr
I gave pkex lifetime as well, switched to jelly anyway π€
Wonderful idea.
The privacy communities might be the best place to start since self-hosting is a big topic. You'll get answers.
I have something like that on my iPhone, except it's like 150GB of media (it's a 512GB phone).
I have a lot more on my Plex server. But, sometimes I'm without Internet and it's nice to be able to queue up a favorite video or movie without worrying about my network connection.
If you only have 10GB, any phone should work. A newer one will have faster data rates than a flash drive. iPhones are guaranteed to. Good Android phones use UFS 3.0 or better which is only slower than what's in an iPhone on paper. In real usage you won't really see a difference. Plus, you have a screen on it so you can watch whenever. I mean the cheap phones now start at like 64GB, iPhones and probably Android flagships start at 128GB, even from a few years ago. So it's plenty of space and it's also emulators and books and whatever else you wanna throw on it. Oh yeah, music too.
Flash drives are a cool idea for having a copy of your most important stuff on you, but don't make them your only copy. I'd also encrypt them if there's sensitive data you'll be carrying around in public.
A NAS with automatic backups really helps keep the library in one place if you're juggling more than a couple of devices. Could make it out of a VM on your main PC, a repurposed old PC, or a dedicated machine. Spinning rust is usually fine for a digital library, maybe a SSD cache if you need extra performance. Don't forget to periodically make a proper cold, offline, and perhaps offsite backup so you don't lose your hard work.
Jellyfin, Syncthing, and Samba are what I've used to access my library and keep things in sync. I've been ripping discs before the rot sets in and downloading Youtube videos before they make it any harder to.
Also, grab a copy of Wikipedia for Kiwix (you can download specific parts with/without media to suit your needs and storage capacity).
As for the flash drive, I like to keep one on my keychain with Live ISOs, diagnostic utilities, and a small copy of Wikipedia in the unencrypted partition and a collection of photos, music, and documents in the encrypted partition.
1- Go see SelfHost
2- Iβll suggest Jellyfin and Kavita [Edit: so far Iβve not tried running Kavita as client but in my test it work well]
You would be better off getting a portable hard drive over using a flash drive.
Yes, I've heard of the so-called emergency suitcase with 200 gigs or more which can last for ten years, unlike flash drives that become unusable after a few years, but I have modest reserves of money...
Is this a thing? This is the default, for me, to store files locally.