I admit this is not a helpful answer but…

If you want to have hundreds of gigabytes or more of media storage plus backups, its going to be expensive. There is no secret cheap way.

This is what makes debrid options so appealing. You can amass terabytes of media data for a cheap monthly cost.

You can then supplement that with a small nas or drive of rare or hard to find media / offline selection in which case you could probably run raid 10 with the small amount that you would actually need to backup.

This exactly.

Keep blowing hot air. Thats all you know how to do. The keyboard warrior generation at its finest.

Even if it was, why screw over the people who are doing what you want? Price hikes arent hurting pirates lol.

This is the new generation in a nutshell.

“Hey someone other then me should do this thing I want”

This made me laugh. Anyone who has lived in central or south america sees this type of thing happen all the time.

Do this all the time with video games. Pirate to try before I buy. If I really like the game I buy it in the hopes it creates an incentive to make more games like the ones I like.

There are legitimate versions of windows that are hard to get as a non enterprise consumer. Such as some of the IOT versions that have much longer security support.

The bar for torrenting is super low. If all you want to do is avoid DMCA notices pretty much any VPN will do as long as you bind it to your torrent client.

In terms of Windscribe they have become a much more respectable VPN if you also want some privacy protections and DNS protections but there are better options.

They used to be a bottom dweller VPN selling off lifetime memberships for $30 in the mid 2000s but have really become a strong privacy advocate over the last few years.

Something can be shady and not a honeypot. It’s much more common. Its like people forgot this and now anytime anyone feels something is sus this type of post appears.

It doesn’t matter what is being discussed, if its about proton the email incident gets brought up.

Here is the deal. No major company is going to break the law for its users. Had the activist been using proton vpn to create and access their email, Proton would not have had the info they were forced to give up. The takeaway from the story is bad opsec is usually what gets people caught whether its activists or hackers.

Whether you use Proton or someone else you will need to trust that service. If you don’t trust them, don’t use them. Its that simple, no need for conjured up FUD excuses.

If all your eggs are encrypted, having those eggs in one basket or five doesn’t matter from a security perspective. Its the same reason you wouldn’t split up your passwords to multiple password managers.

That being said the much more likely scenario is that at some point in your lifetime Protons values change (either by being purchased or new leadership) and you have to move on. That’s why, regardless of how good a providers security is, its good to have backups elsewhere.

This whole line of thinking seems to be based on FUD more then anything else.

There is no evidence or reason to believe some major compromise of proton will happen.

If your that worried about proton you probably should just not use the service at all.

Also using the 3-2-1 backup rules should help mitigate this fear of having everything with one service.

Just like any lifetime guarantee, its guaranteeing access for the lifetime of the service (which could end at any moment) not your lifetime.

services that promise lifetime or forever accessability should be avoided.