For my buddy and I our critical data doesn’t change often so once or twice a year when we get together we swap drives again. Simple spinning discs for us. No need for hardware or anything to keep them running. They just sit on a shelf just in case something happens we can hand it back to pull the data back onto a running server

My friend who lives a thousand miles away swaps hard drives with me that are backups of critical stuff. He keeps my data, I keep his. As others have said your garage is a start but you really want some sort of geographically separate backup.

Por que no los DOS? (Pun intended)

But really it’s been two things. I’ve had to adapt algorithms to some extremely ancient hardware that had another twenty years planned service, and I’ve had to work on robot operating systems where timing of operations is extremely important

“human legible”

Have you looked at a punch card? I like some assembly, but the punch card is just dots. They blur together until all you see are holes and more holes and structure has lost all meaning.

That econdary drive I highly recommend you find a way to move that out of your house. For me I have a friend 8 hours away, we swap drives on occasion to keep each other’s backups in case of flood/fire/toddler or whatever other force of nature to save ourselves cloud backup costs

I’ve submitted a few pull requests to some self hosting software repos. I’ve also put in a lot of time editing a large crowd sourced data set. Currently working on a crowd sourced set of translations on old public domain comics.

Even just reporting bugs you find or interface pain points is a big help. Nothing wrong with just being a user.