Downsizing. If you don’t need to run or keep stuff, then you don’t need so many servers and storage. You may run stuff on cheap mini-pcs.

Sleep: In my experience sleep sucks, I’ve spent long hours planning around sleep in homelab, like: when do I restart, do updates, when do I upload backups. I have Pi and at some point I realised some actions on Pi need my sleeping NAS… so I dropped all the sleep and now it works 24/7.

I’m not sure you’ll get nice performance in local network with small appliances (consumer network hardware, mini PCs and rpi 4). I’ve never got sub-ms network disk access on 1Gbps switch and router. In the end I’ve done the opposite - I’ve added one k8s host with a lot of storage, and any storage services are deployed there. All the other k8s services rely on local SSDs.

There probably is a clever way that you could do it, but clever ways are easy to overstep, misconfigure and can be unreliable long-term.

Congratulations, now your „password” (the 512-byte random key file) is stored as plaintext on your machine :)

With rate-limiting, non-trivial passwords are not viable to be brute-forced, so making them larger just doesn’t give you much.

I’m running ZFS mirror on Ubuntu on a USFF machine with 2 external USB 2.5’’ drives. I do weekly scrubs, never lost any data even during power loss. Some of the 2.5’’ USB drivers are crap, I had to replace drive 2 times over last 5 years - while one of the drives is with me since the beginning.

I would say that a lot of people over-secure their local home file storage. If you use filesystem (or software) that does checksumming, your home data will be safe. Yeah, in case of power loss you may lose like 2s of last writes on ext4, and that won’t matter much for majority of people because it’s not like it’s your company’s only copy of internal data.

AGPL means they are licensing it to you, they are not bound by the license because they are the copyright owners.