No.
No.
I’ve been using Kopia for all my backups for a couple years, both backing up my desktop and containers. It’s been very reliable, and it has nice features like being able to mount a backup.
It’s not a walled garden though, Valve made no attempts to lock anything down. You can install something like Heroic Game Launcher on the Steam Deck and play Epic Game Store or GOG games too.
For any family photos and documents you can’t afford to lose, make sure you have backups of it. A RAID array does not mean you don’t need backups: you want at least 3 copies, at least one offsite.
The copy in your RAID array is one copy. You can back that up to an external hard drive or something as a second copy. Then have an offsite backup on something like Backblaze as your third copy.
You’ll need to check the documentation of every app, they usually have an option to set a base path so the app will add that base path to every link and resource.
If some of the apps don’t have support for that, the next option would be to build from source and patch all the links yourself.
"AI compute module"s exist, they are called GPUs. All the matrix calculations that go into neural networks are highly parallelizable, which means GPUs are optimal for them. A cheap used GPU will beat anything you can cook up yourself.
I don’t like that garage requires manual intervention to upgrade, so I went with minio which can upgrade automatically. I have it deployed with docker, and I use watchtower to pull in upgrades automatically without intervention.
I do love minio. I have backups going into it, and I use it to host my static website blog too.
I thought that ToS was just for their CDN?
You can also use Tailscale Funnel, it does the same thing and doesn’t have a limitation on what kind of content you put through it.
If you are looking to use it for 5 years, I’d say go with Fairphone. They actually have a 5 year warranty and committed to providing software updates for 6 years. All other phones will lose support in 2 or 3 years, leaving you vulnerable to security vulnerabilities.
The police can confiscate your servers. Considering some states are treating abortion as murder, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to say the police could raid your home and confiscate your devices just on suspicion.
The only thing safe against that is an encrypted device locked with a password, no biometrics like fingerprints or face ID. As far as I know, you can refuse to give a password under the 5th amendment, but you can’t refuse to unlock a device with a fingerprint reader or face ID.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein? The new Wolfensteins have quite a bit of story, but the old one is all skippable.
ext4 on an mdadm raid. It works well enough, and supports growing your array.
Although if I rebuilt this from scratch, I would skip mdadm and just let minio control all the drives. Minio has an S3 compatible API, which I’d then mount into whatever apps need it.
Anything that can run programs and stay on all day. Raspberry Pi’s, or their alternatives work great. Any old computer or laptop you have would work too. Or you can get a used PC, or build a new one if you have money to waste.
I can vouch for the node 804, although I haven’t used the others so I can’t say which is the best.