I largely agree with you. I don’t include my pirated media in my cloud backups, both because as you said it’s easily recoverable and I’m not about to pay for 10’s of Terabytes of cloud storage lol. The only redundancy I have for them is the fact that they’re stored on a RAID array vs just being on single drive. It’s just personal records and documents, photos, and personal code that I have backed up into the cloud.

As an aside, I’m kind of confused as to how you were able to redownload all your media faster than copying it over from one NAS to another. I have my NAS connected to my network with a 10Gbps fiber spf+ module and only have 1Gbps from my ISP, so I can copy 10x faster than I could just download. Even if you had the nas on 1Gbps surely copying would be faster, or at least not slower than, downloading, especially when considering the overhead of unpacking, parity checking, etc right?

And that’s with me thinking about all this with Usenet, which has always consistently maxed out my available download bandwidth. My experience with torrents is that it’s much less consistent with fully utilizing all my available download bandwidth just bc it’s more reliant on the seeders upload rate caps.

At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter i guess.