Do you use software to organise files and remove duplicates?
Yes and no. I use my two hands + one eye (the other doesn’t work) + find, du, rsync (in comparison mode) and diff. Everything I have is on a FreeBSD VM (docs, pictures) + Ubuntu VM (movies) so native tools work great for me.
How do you store and backup your data?
I have multiple Proxmox hosts that are not in a cluster. All of them and their VMs are being backed up on a physically separate Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) locally every day. In addition to that this system does rsnapshot backups on all of the VMs and hosts I care about. So it has 2 different storage backends (disk pools) - 1 for rsnapshot and 1 for Proxmox Backup Server. Both are 20TB in size and one uses XFS and the other uses EXT4. Every day the PBS backups are synced to a remote PBS instance in Hetzner Germany (my systems are in Bulgaria). The Hetzner system has 40TB in raidz2 (ZFS) and keeps all of the backups for 2 years. My storage VMs are also configured to do snapshots every 15 minutes and keep them for 24h. Yearly I also download my most important data and write it to BD discs and store those in my summer house.
So in short I have the following: Local snapshots every 15 minutes, 2 daily backups on an independent system using different software and storage backends, 1 daily remote backup on a system in another country, 1 yearly offline backup. It’s not perfect but it’s affordable and somewhat secure.
A data loser ? 😂