takes enormous amounts of data and is hard

Seems like this was acknowledged, but a good point nonetheless (that's often overlooked).

I'm currently sitting on 4TB of data (that's largely movies and TV shows), running on 4-year-old hardware, with 3 local replicants, backed up to cloud.

My power and cloud costs are trivial - about 25 cents a day - that's less than $100/year (after hardware costs, which come out to about $150/year to continue with similar performance levels). My 4 year old "server" idles at about 20 watts. I can probably bring this down to perhaps 10w with a newer NUC or similar.

I could easily store everything my extended family produces (including cousins, about 50 people) with a similar setup. In fact, I'm working on just such a project - an SFF or NUC type device with sufficient.

Edit: autocorrect changed $100 to $10