I guess at the end of it I enjoy this time of year. There's one unchanging reality though. After Thanksgiving there's just no getting anything done that's not related to preparing for Christmas.
I've been noodling switching to SageTV for our PVR needs. In the meantime I've been researching the details and trying to make sure it'll actually do what we want it to. I'd be annoyed if we spent money on gear and didn't end up with a good solution. It's looking pretty good though. I think after the 25th I'll try the demo version of SageMC and try to get a sense for the flow of using it.
Related to that, if I go with SageTV part of my criteria is backing up all of our DVD's. I haven't decided if I just want to rip them to h.264 or if I want to preserve the extras. The argument against preserving the extras is that we can simply pop in the DVD if we want to get to that and raw ISO's of the DVD's would take up a LOT more space than compressed h.264. DVD management has become a real problem with the kids though and it sure would be nice to have all of that digitized. Either way, DVD's will require a lot more storage space than I already have.
I'm probably going to head in the direction of a Linux based software RAID using LVM. Sounds really cool from what I've been reading. I should be able to add disks and arrays and expand the volume dynamically through LVM. No more shifting of content around when an array gets too small. I should also see a performance boost as I'm using windows software RAID 5 currently. It's been working fine for me but I've also been reading horror stories. Not to mention the performance is rotten compared to Linux.
Look for posts regarding all of this after the 25th.