Ah, I didn't know of this. This should be in the linked article! Because it's one of the ways to turn rsync into a real backup! (I didn't know this flag- I thought this was the main point of rdiff-backup.)

I run mbsync/isync to keep a maildir copy of my email (hosted by someone else).

You can run it periodically with cron or systemd timers, it connects to an IMAP server, downloads all emails to a directory (in maildir format) for backup. You can also use this to migrate to another IMAP server.

If the webmail sucks, I wouldn't run my own. I would consider using Thunderbird. It is a desktop/Android application. It syncs mail to your desktop/phone, so most of the time, it's working with local storage so it's much faster than most webmails.

Hah, no worries. I think it's just an unusual use case and... well, I recognized it because I'm obsessed with PiKVM lately and those things!

I'm not superknowledgeable on USB, but Linux has features to do this; they are called "gadgets" in this list:

https://docs.kernel.org/usb/index.html

I have used this to turn a RPI Zero into a virtual USB drive with these scripts: https://github.com/alexpdp7/rpi-zero-usb-iso/

Likely by searching the Internet for USB gadgets you might find good explanations about requirements. I know there are unexpected difficulties- I'm using a Pi Zero instead of a nicer Pi because... nicer Pis can draw too much power over USB and bork what they're connected to. So be careful.

If this needs to be "hardware" level, I saw https://openterface.com/ recently. The PiKVM-style projects are also a bit adjacent to this.

How much storage you want? Do you want any specific feature beyond file sharing?

How much experience do you have self hosting stuff? What is the purpose of this project? (E.g. maybe you want a learning experience, not using commercial services, just need file sharing?)

To be fair, if you want to sync your work across two machines, Git is not ideal because well, you must always remember to push, If you don't push before switching to the other machine, you're out of luck.

Syncthing has no such problem, because it's real time.

However, it's true that you cannot combine Syncthing and Git. There are solutions like https://github.com/tkellogg/dura, but I have not tested it.

There's some lack of options in this space. For some, it might be nicer to run an online IDE.

...

To add something, I second the "just use Git over ssh without installing any additional server". An additional variation is using something like Gitolite to add multi-user support to raw Git, if you need to support multiple users and permissions; it's still lighter than running Forgejo.

Yep, I do that on Debian hosts, EL (RHEL/Rocky/etc.) have a similar feature.

However, you need to keep an eye for updates that require a reboot. I use my own Nagios agent that (among other things) sends me warnings when hosts require a reboot (both apt/dnf make this easy to check).

I wouldn't care about last online/reboots; I just do some basic monitoring to get an alert if a host is down. Spontaneous reboots would be a sign of an underlying issue.

Try a LiveCD or installing Windows to an external drive (or if you are able to dualboot, although I don't recommend dualbooting in general).

As for your original question, all PC/component manufacturers invest time in making their stuff work on Windows. Few do the same for Linux. Linux has a ton of people working to make hardware work, but it's always going to be an uphill struggle if you don't choose hardware explicitly for Linux support. Although I think your most recent issue is hardware (but I can't know for sure).

I don't use Nextcloud calendars or address books. But I assume they are included in regular backups.

I pay about 50€ for all absolute overkill Hetzner dedicated server (128gb of RAM).

I live in two different flats in different cities because of personal circumstances.

I use LDAP auth, but no SSO or external mounts. Actually, I tested external mounts, but they gave me bad vibes, although they are interesting.

The other thing, I just run a preview generator application, no other plugins.

I see some CPU and memory usage on my setup... but I don't even see any IO!

Literally, the IO chart for "week (maximum)" on Proxmox for my Nextcloud LXC container is 0, except for two bursts, of 3 hours of less each. (Maybe package updates?)

The PostgreSQL LXC container has some more activity (but not much), but that's backing Nextcloud and four other applications (one being Miniflux, which has much more data churn).