I don't consider myself to be a proper data hoarder since I only have tens of TiB at my disposal, but I managed to minimize the work, mental space, and time aspects by automating as much as possible. At first, I had a bunch of scripts running on a raspberry pi, but now I have the entire process managed by Home Assistant.
its a rube goldberg machine involving mqtt, VMs, cheap VPSs, rsync, and wifi plugs, but it works. I only get notified if a daily backup fails, and always get full summary of the weeklies. I probably could automate the process of writing to DVD, so the only manual thing I'd need to do would be to insert blank disks, but my quality of life has drastically improved.
As for cost, I'm still working on it, and my storage needs are very predictable so I can hunt for deals ahead of time - I still have unused HDDS from last year. It is common to find discounts to about $12/TiB, which is cheap.
It helps that I enjoy coding, and that I deeply care about the data I'm preserving. I got burned after losing 2-years worth of unbacked-up data scraped off Twitter right before they closed the API, so I'm never ever going to get that data back again.
The backup automation evolved pretty organically, but slowly. I was happy when I finally was able to get the weekly backup process to start automatically.
its a rube goldberg machine involving mqtt, VMs, cheap VPSs, rsync, and wifi plugs, but it works. I only get notified if a daily backup fails, and always get full summary of the weeklies. I probably could automate the process of writing to DVD, so the only manual thing I'd need to do would be to insert blank disks, but my quality of life has drastically improved.
As for cost, I'm still working on it, and my storage needs are very predictable so I can hunt for deals ahead of time - I still have unused HDDS from last year. It is common to find discounts to about $12/TiB, which is cheap.