I switched to Fastmail about 2 years ago and have been happy with it. Does everything I want and it is quick and smooth like it’s name.

They aren’t coming. “Move fast, break things.” Including people aparrently.

Remember you aren’t just backing up the data but also backing up the hours of effort it takes to rebuild and get it how you want. If frequently backing up just the service OS you can store heaps for $2 on offerings like OVH cold archive.

Remove yourself from the backup you’ll forget or it will be inconvenient the week it blows up, so automate it, check the automation monthly. Don’t care that the 2nd cold backup takes ages if you have a quicker main backup.

Fireproof safes aren’t melt heatproof. Don’t rely on a local house backups for fireproofing.

I’m a self hoster, and hate subscription services but I believe cloud storage for use with a compressed encrypted backup makes sense.

Backup media and other stuff separately to avoid one large slow monolithic backup.

“How slow is it?” My desktop is so slow, it comes with a prompt that says ‘Execute now to guarantee completion before Christmas.’

RPi Digital Signage is really good. Binaryemotions.com. it’s built thoughtfully for a bunch of different situations. The kiosk mode paired with some sort of start page would work.

If you have a Google account you can setup webhooks to a chat space. That’s the best way if it supports it. If you continue to have this problem with email only you could setup n8n to receive notifications via other methods and forward them to a webhook.

Ok over it.

The Ikea stuff works fine. When it comes to smart plugs, The IKEA switches make a louder solenoid “chonk” sound when they turn on. Xiaomi plugs are quieter and the smallest I’ve seen. Means you are more likely to fit something next to it. They are a little bit more expensive but I think worth it.

Looks a little pricey but probably would work fine. I bought my first zstack based Texas for $25. Worked fine for a couple of years till I realized it had a limit on how many devices it could handle. so I upgraded it to the next model up for another $25. That’s when I found out if you change methods you have to re adopt everything. But if I kept it on the same method (zstack Texas zha) all I did was swap the dongle and everything kept rolling just with a higher limit of devices.

If you VPS it, remember to add a snapshot backup. Such as $5 vultr VPS always add the $2 snapshot backup option.