My beloved animixplay went down and some of the OVAs that were on there aren't all on the other sites I've tried since (9anime mainly). I don't want to torrent everything, but I'd like to have a small collection of my favorite shows just in case. What prompted this was going through all of Angel Beats! the last two days and having to seriously work to track down the second OVA.
I'm not super knowledgeable about torrenting and which sites are safe. The site I use for movies and shows currently doesn't have all the anime I'm looking for
For currently airing anime, SubsPlease (formerly HorribleSubs) does the trick. Otherwise, yeah, Nyaa is my go-to (if you use Verizon or some other ISP that blocks Nyaa, you'll need to use a VPN to access the site).
Not torrents, but XDCC can also be helpful for finding old stuff that might not be seeded anymore but is still on someone's IRC bot. NIBL is a good indexer of a bunch of different packlists, and you can also try AniMK as a backup.