I might be a problem if you are logged out of your plex account while offline. But I didn’t have to login for years on either of my clients. You can also give special access to local IP addresses on LAN to ignore authentication. But yeah, that’s a bit hidden in the settings.

You need an internet connection to connect to a offline LAN Plex server

Not true.

" When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge"

So as a plex pass holder it shouldn’t affect any of my (current?) users? Am I reading this right?

edit: Seems I’m good.

I have a NAS with 2.2GHz quad-core, 8GB RAM running plex.

So far my record was 7 simultaneous remote streams (I think 2 were transcodes, the rest direct play), which it handled fine. And going by CPU usage, it should be able to handle 5 transcoding sessions (1080p max) at once.

Though, I usually run into bandwidth limits before I run into CPU limits (hopefully I’ll get fibre this year).

Yeah, I have 31 remote users (though less then 10 are actually active). If you’re running a server setup to the point of supporting that, the plex lifetime pass is just a piss in the wind.

But the lemmy FOSS crowd is strong, we’re severely outnumbered here :D

OP probably doesn’t have a plex pass.

Unless therer was some major update in the last 6 months I’ve missed, I’d say no … not even close.

Personally I’m more on the paranoid side, so I went with raid 6 and a hot spare. So in case of failure I can rebuild one disk immediately and not having to buy one first. But so far I’ve never had a disk failure.

In addition I was thinking of having the 8TB HDD as a standalone to backup the documents and maybe the photos and the docker setups.

That is a very good idea. I also can’t quite afford to backup my main storage of movies/shows, but at least all the important personal documents (and my music) is properly backed up.