I primarily buy used drives. Depending on your area, you might find buyers easily for your old 4TB+ ones.

Also the “auto normalize” option (true by default and only shown in advanced settings) can mess-up with your source files. Mouting source files read-only won’t work either as it is creating files in source folders.

These IPFS issues are basically UI-related. You wouldn’t expect a torrent to start within 2 seconds. You wouldn’t expect your torrent to be shared autonomously either. Technically, sharing IPFS hashes along with release names (similar to the crc32 on pre databases) would be very efficient, if only it was popular with a proper UI and indexing tooling. These hashes could even be signed by scene groups in the nfo.

I’d say yes. The user base / visibility of i2p torrent is pretty limited though. You can have a look at the Postman i2p tracker.

Sounds overkill just for backing up files.

Agree on Wireguard. It is faster, more stable and most likely more secured than SSH. And it will work with any application (no per-application configuration required). Without a third party tunneling service, you will need to expose a port in any case (you can setup port-knocking if you want to).

DHT is autonomous and does not require a tracker. Usually it is only used as a fallback as a regular tracker is quicker. It’s p2p, and is split accross people hosting it.

I’m fine with Rofi. I’ve used xfce4-appfinder also, it’s less minimal, not configurable (good graphical defaults, might be what you want).

I use BTRFS for the same. Being able to check for and repair silent corruptions is a must (and this is without needing to read the whole drives, only the actual files). I’ve had a lot of them over the years, including (but not only) because of a cheap USB controller also.

I use Signal, but I’m unable to force everybody to do the same.

Any chance to use Whatsapp on /e/ ?