Not what you are asking for, but maybe what you want: https://invidious.io/ is a youtube front end with some features that might or might not make it what you want.

Even hand coded projects need more than 6 months before I’ll replace anything in my stacks. Too many projects start with great intention but then the founder gets bored (life gets in the way?) and they go unmaintained. Really I’m looking for projects that enough developers have got involved in that I can be confident it won’t go stagnant. I could be one of those developers, but I don’t have enough time to contribute to all the different projects I use (I barely have time to contribute to the one project I maintain)

Get lucky - just as this was starting I saw a failed disk notification on my NAS so I ordered a new drive just before they went up. Then I realized it was a stale notification for the drive I replaced a year ago so I have a spare should one fail.

somebody is going to want cash in

Maybe. The hard drive makers have long experience with boom-bust cycles. They are likely trying to figure out if this is real, or just a blip and in a two years (when the new factory opens!) demand drops again.

If there is new capacity in the future my guess (guess!) is that this is a case of a new factory to replace the old, and they just keep running the old for another year instead of scrapping it right away.

Start with a problem. What you trying to solve. Hosting music is different from backing up your computer. That is different from a home dashboard.

Because I have no idea if the questioner is going to do that beforehand

When IPv6 was first created, the dream was that your machine would get a new IP address any time the whole network felt some need for that. The idea was, as someone added a network, we may need to change the way your systems are numbered in order to make the backbone routing a lot easier to fit in memory. This hasn’t seemed to work out, but that was the dream.

I assume your ZFS system has plenty of redundancy. Thus, I would enable snapshots and do a regular rotation because ZFS snapshots are so easy to recover from for most disasters. What that leaves is the catastrophic losses from, say, your house burning down. So you still need something off-site, but the ZFS will cover most of your backup needs.

I did the monthly arch upgrade and had to reboot to get some service to come up. Took an extra 5 minutes this month.

It might be but it is risky - if anything goes wrong there goes that data.

The problem is people don’t want a focused community. They want a broad community so when they have a question they can ask and find an expert - but not so broad that the noise means they can’t follow anything. We do focused communities because the world (or even internet) has too many people and so the noise of all the discussions is too much. However that isn’t what we want.

I use grocy for chore /task management. Then home assistant to put it on a dashboard that looks nice. I’m not totally happy but it is the best I’ve found.

I had a few cousins who took and finished all my grandma’s unfinished quilts. They were already into quilting though. YMMV, but it is a good example - if there is someone who can understand/take this over give it to them.

Core or Scale? If running Core I’d say install plain FreeBSD on it. Even if scale I’d consider that in a full wipe - FreeBSD is great as a server and supports ZFS out of the box without problems.

Then grow a long beard (not optional, even if female) so you can be “the old guy who has seen it all”

The problem is “Evil” people who see rules now know what abuse they can get by with and they have incentive to find all the weird loopholes the the rest of us wouldn’t think of. I don’t know a good answer to this.

minis like the N100 when you are using it to do things has a lot more ability and uses a similar amount of watts (or can do a lot more for more for just a bit more watts). However when the box is just sitting there with the power on but otherwise doing nothing it uses more power than ARM based single board computers. So the real question is how much will they want to do when they are using it, and how often will that be. If they are watching movies/playing games for 16 hours a day the mini PC is the better answer and won’t really cost more energy to run. If they are leaving this on, but only using it for a couple hours per month than a device that uses less watts will save money.

NAS can be two different things.

NAS is just “network attached storage”: a computer that has a bunch of disks attached to your network. IF you put a single disk on your network and nfs/samba to share it you have created a simple NAS - I strongly recommend you put in more drives for redundancy, but that is all NAS is.

Often NAS is taken to mean not just the above, but a custom machine that does the above. The downside is these custom machines are often slow, and put weird hardware/software on them such that if the whole box breaks (as opposed to just a single disk failing which they are good at handling) you may not be able to recover anything. One variation of this you want more space and discover you can’t upgrade it at all. They are an easy way into NAS, but the downsides are such that I can’t recommend them anyway.

Many NAS work like that though. Hardware RAID always seems to work like that so if you get a fancy card that supports RAID you been make sure you have a good long term support contract that will be there for you when there are problems (if you are not paying hundreds of thousands per year you don’t have a good support contract)

Not all are that way. Many run ZFS which is great for this and you can replace broken hardware and recover. BTFS is commonly used as well, probably not as good as zfs but likely good enough.

I’ve been using fastmail for a long time for this now. I’ve been happy, not to expensive. I’m surprised they haven’t been recommended, normally when the question is asked there are a million fastmail recommendations

Changed my family dashboard from magic mirror to a home assistant dashboard. I’m missing some cute things, but the major functions work better, and I get some options that I didn’t before.