I'm a horder. I have a lot of little things that are useful to me and only occasionally useful to others. Most of them are in my office or in a "bug-out"/tech/3-day-bag I travel with. Included in those is a 1TB NVMe drive in an enclosure with a short USB-C to USB-C or USB-A cable. It contains bits of software for Linux, MacOS, and Windows, Just In CaseTM. Things like a recent version of Librewolf, Libreoffice, TOR, a commercial VPN, Win/ATAK plus a TAK server, and a couple other things I can't remember.
Along side those are some ISOs to a couple of key Linux distros (likely Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, ipfire, and proxmox, it's been awhile), Windows 10, and a Windows Server ISO, probably 2019. There's some IMGs for RPI's in both 32 and 64 bit ARM flavors.
Those have all stemmed from an obsession to to have everything I need so I don't miss out on an opportunity to help someone. Maybe it's a selfish thing, but I'd rather have it and not need it then have it and say, "Oh, I wish I had that, I could help you!". I have faith that someday I'll need it, and I'll be ready.
Enter: 6TB of storage.
Actually it's closer to 7TB, but 4 of that is in a RAID array, some of it is on my 1TB drive, and the other 2 is on a drive in a box in my closet. (An additional 32GB is sitting on a RPI 0 W at my parents house running Syncthing to sync my KeepassXC vault and Obsidian notes, more on that in another article).
Do I really need these ISOs? No. But more than once has a random company based out of Silicon valley found my catalog and has asked for a copy of XYZ random software they can't find on archive.org or archiveos.org. It also saves me bandwith when OpenMediaVault's Samba implimentation goes down and Microcrap's Windoze-off-and-not-work doesn't do the one thing that you would ever want to pay extra for: SMB and fileshares. (Hint: use FTP, my favorite client is Filezilla)
I've made the investment in a couple good drives, a system to run them, and pay monthly for an internet connection to continue to host (read: torrent) these files. It also helps distrowatch.com because I feel bad that I consume more than my fair share of bandwith and donate in Bitcoin to them (your counter is broken BTW, I've donated and it doesn't show up!).
Unless I have a torrent running, I probably don't have a signature or hash file to verify the integrity of these ISOs.
It's OK to hoard. Drives are meant to be written to, right?
It's OK to have a lot of software. You never know when you'll need it.
It's OK to have a lot of ISOs. You never know when you'll need to reinstall Windows (probably next week).
My collection isn't as big as it once was. I used to have everything on that 2TB drive and I was up to 1.8TB of files before (during a "quick" Arch install) I wiped the MBR partition and didn't know how to recover it properly.
I'm willing to give away what files I have and will accept additions from reputable sources.
I forgive myself for losing that data. It was a learning experience and I've grown from it.
I use BTRFS, which should cut down on some maintenance. SMART data is at 100% for all my drives, I'll keep an eye on it though.
My wife can see my purchases through our shared credit card and Amazon account, so I'll definitely ask her before ordering any 20TB drives.
Need something? My Contact me page isn't up yet, but send me a message on the bottom of the article tree element on the home page and we can arrange something. It works with email or SMS.
I do this completely free of charge, mostly out of fear of taxes. JK. There's not any garentee that I actually have these files I'm claiming to, and if you're looking to get my address for a Cease and Desist, well, I'm just kidding about the files. They're free on the internet, just like Apple's OS key, which can be found in a legal document here.