That wasn’t luck - it was best practice backup strategy.

That’s because “Dual License” means there are two licenses. Anyone can use it under the terms of the LGPL. If a company doesn’t want to abide by those terms, they can pay them not to by buying one of the commercial licenses

Nope - it was Unix not Linux. The minus makes the command invalid on many Unix versions of tar (though most modern BSD versions allow it)

Sorry, it was Solaris - you just blew it up (the minus is invalid on many Unix versions of tar)

For a privacy friendly OS, surprised nobody has mentioned Freedombox

It’s designed explicitly for your use case, along with an easy path to other self hosted services. When you’re ready for more than it offers through the web interface, it’s a full Debian install under the hood - so you can install whatever you need to. Privacy friendly and super stable, with smooth upgrades to new releases and security updates for old versions several years after the new one is available.

As far as hardware, your old computer is probably more powerful than a Pi and can support more drives, but the Pi will be more power efficient. As others have mentioned, if you care about your data long term then backups are a must, so a separate NAS or a Pi with a large drive for backup storage is a good idea as well, whatever OS you choose.

Not true. Free cellular connections exist in some places. And there are non-cellular solutions like LoRA trackers.

I can’t take credit for writing it, but here you go!

https://workaround.org/