Does anyone else arrange their data in a way that protects against the inevitability of a windows install failing??

No…I arrange it against the potential of the OS install failing. No OS is infallible or immune to you or some bad other thing happening. I wouldn’t put my data on the same partition of a Linux install either- I wouldn’t put it on the same disk even, if I could avoid it, just like on Windows. If for no other reason than historically, having all your stuff on the same disk as the OS could cause really significant performance impacts. It’s less of an issue with solid state storage, but it’s still there, to say nothing of storage density of hard disks vs solid state.

Plus, depending on what you are doing, it’s very possible that your OS disk is the most active one in your system, so it’s going to potentially have wear related problems much sooner than your data disks.

Did you have a point you were making?

what to immediately nuke

This scenario is the one that you have to approach differently than the others. The only way to approach with this scenario and be reasonable sure it’ll go the way you want, is to have the default state be inaccessible. i.e. everything that you want to be “nuked” has to be already in an encrypted state that only you are able to access. This way, the nuked state is the default state if you aren’t around to grant access.

X can be an abstract FTP like server which uses rclone instead a file system. Or can be a web server that uses rclone

You literally just listed 2 ways to do exactly what you are asking. Why would those not work?

Ohhh…are you not mounting the remote? You know you can do that right, mount an rclone remote? If you mount the remote, it’ll just show up as a file path to your system, and you can just serve it via whatever server you like.

The trick here might be if you are running under Windows, getting other user accounts/system services to have access to things can take some fiddling, depending on how you set things up.

I see a lot of usb enclosures on Amazon but the idea of running like 5 disks over a single usb makes me nervous.

Why does it make you nervous?

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I also keep seeing the 4 bay qnap DAS that can do raid 5. That’s tempting too to prevent data loss.

The mantra: RAID is not backup. RAID is for uptime and recovery in hardware failure scenarios. Backup is your protection against data loss, not RAID. If your entire RAID array catches fire, gets struck by lightning, gets caught in a flood- whatever, if it hits the whole thing, it’s gone.

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What would you recommend for external storage?

Well, you have to answer the “why” question above. There’s no universal answer to this question. I myself on Windows, use multiple USB connected JBOD enclosures (16 disks). I use StableBit DrivePool to aggregate disks(on Linux, I’d use something like MergerFS), instead of any kind of RAID. I use a feature DrivePool has to duplicate specified folders across multiple disks for local redundancy to improve recovery time against corruption/hw failure etc to make up for not having RAID, with BackBlaze to perform backups to prevent data loss in disaster scenarios.

It works for me, and I’m fine with any differences in performance I might get- they largely just aren’t that impactful most of the time in my use-case. It might not be what you want. You have to consider what things are most important to you to determine what storage setup you want to use.

at a guess, probably that involves managing it manually, and balancing by hand is a pain. And you aren’t really helping yourself organizing, you still basically have to remember did you put something in disk1/folder1 or disk2/folder1 etc.

MergerFS on Linux or DrivePool on windows where you have an actual disk pool manages spreading the files out for you transparently.

You want what is called a union filesystem- essential presenting multiple, separate disks as though they were a single disk. It looks like Macs used to support this natively until a few years ago, probably not enough people used it.

It kinda looks like you might be stuck for solutions on a mac. Perhaps you should consider adding network storage that gives you more flexibility.

For any reasonably popular format, I wouldn’t worry about it. GIF is a bad format by modern standards, it’s 36 years old, and it still works.

Between virtual machines, and the Internet itself, I find it highly unlikely to ever be a problem with any (video/image)format in common use today. The very _worst_ case, is you’d have to find the spec, and write your own codec to view something. I have no fear that it’ll become a problem to find the specs for jpeg or GIF in my lifetime, to say nothing of formats that were open from day 1 like PNG.

The scenarios where we have trouble accessing common media formats in the next say, 50 years at least, all seem like ones where we’d have bigger problems then looking at old family photos.

Your concern as a general idea isn’t without merit- it’s just I wouldn’t really worry about it applying to image or video formats. We can still play RealMedia fine and how long has it been since that’s had any relevance? The thing with these formats too, is once the codec has been built, if a format ceases having relevance, there’s very little downside/reason not to just keep including them in players. Computing architecture would have to under go a massive, unexpected shift to make anything outright stop working in the near future(at least on non-Apple platforms), and even then, source exists for a lot of open source apps that you’d just need to get to recompile on said new platform.

Honestly, the state of data formats and such these days, the problem with dead formats anyone cared about becoming on nearly permanently inaccessible has probably already come and gone as computers become a commodity and standardized down to a few platforms.

For these common use formats, I suspect the problem is far more of a hypothetical then a real possibility.