I am owned by several dogs and cats. I have been playing non-computer roleplaying games for almost five decades. I am interested in all kinds of gadgets, particularly knives, flashlights, and pens.
I use option #1. Each instance of KeePass maintains a local file, but updates them automatically whenever it opens or closes. I also back up the file to my personal server automatically, so I have a copy even if the cloud service fails for some reason.
This setup has been serving me well for a long time.
I have a small UPS to keep my fiber and router working for a while and I have a larger UPS for my server. Even the larger UPS will only keep the server going for maybe half-an-hour, but most outages here are short. For me, the most important benefit is that my UPS will tell my server to shutdown when it begins to get short of power. Graceful shutdowns remove the risk of corruption and data loss.
If you need to add more than one drive you should look at external enclosures. There are 4-drive models just over $100 and 8-drive models just over $200. You connect them with eSata, USB 3, or USB C, depending on the enclosure.
It’s the only “no cost” option I know of that provides an off-site backup. And once it occurred to me, it was really easy to set up.
Yeah, that was where I finally came out too. I still own the discs. My only worry is that some of my collection is beginning to age. I’ve had a few DVDs that were no longer readable.
My server runs Plex and has almost 50 TB of video on it. After looking at all the commercial backup options I gave up on backing up that part of the data. :-(
I do backup my personal data, which is less than a terrabyte at this point. I worked out an arrangement with a friend who also runs a server. We each have a drive in the other’s server that we use for backup. Every night cron runs a simple rsync script to do an incremental backup of everything new to the other machine.
This approach cost nothing beyond getting the drives. And we will still have our data even if one of the servers is physically destroyed and unrecoverable.
I don’t know if this will help, but I’ve been using Plex to manage my music and other audio for more than a decade. It pulls in metadata from online sources and allows me to search or apply filters. That is a lot more versatile than anything I could do directly with the files.
If you aren’t interested in running your own server, look at some of the more sophisticated player apps. Many of them can provide similar metadata features. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about how the files are physically organized.