Yeah, if there’s a full system failure without any backups and no option to get the system operational again then I would land in clone the drives before trying to restore data from them.

1. RAID is never a replacement for backups.
2. Never work directly with a surviving disk, clone it and work with the cloned drive.
3. Are you sure you can’t rebuild the RAID? That really is the best solution in many cases.
4. If a RAID failure is within tolerance (1 drive in a RAID5 array) then it should still be operational. Make a backup before rebuilding if you don’t have one already.
5. If more disks are gone than that then don’t count on recovering all data even with data recovery tools.

The first thing to check is whether you can install your CAD software on a virtual machine with your current license. If you have good internet at home and already own a CAD machine then it might be easier to setup VPN access and remote control that machine for your Windows needs. Sunshine/Moonlight works good if you have the bandwidth for it.

Interesting that Toshiba/Seagate has best 16TB stats and WDC bad ones in comparison, but for 14TB it’s reversed. My homelab disks apparently has 0.71% risk of dying after 22 months (seagate exos x16 st16000nm001g).
edit: WDC does good in 16TB too, their only outlier there could be due to low number of disks in deive count. And the same is true when checking total no of disks for 14TB.

I can only be another “everyone” and say go for a Synology. If you wanna run services on your NAS then the DSM is a godsend. The 423+ sounds like a good fit, might wanna grab a RAM upgrade for it though.

edit: As you mentioned Jellyfin - if you wanna stream video you definitely want the 423+ and not the 923+ as the AMD Ryzen R1600 lacks GPU to transcode video streams.

Alternatively, you can create new users from the command line.
This can be done as follows:

If synapse was installed via pip, activate the virtualenv as follows (if Synapse was installed via a prebuilt package, register_new_matrix_user should already be on the search path):

cd ~/synapse
source env/bin/activate
synctl start # if not already running
Run the following command:
register_new_matrix_user -c homeserver.yaml
This will prompt you to add details for the new user, and will then connect to the running Synapse to create the new user. For example:

New user localpart: erikj
Password:
Confirm password:
Make admin [no]:
Success!

This process uses a setting registration_shared_secret, which is shared between Synapse itself and the register_new_matrix_user script.
It doesn’t matter what it is (a random value is generated by --generate-config), but it should be kept secret, as anyone with knowledge of it can register users, including admin accounts, on your server even if enable_registration is false.

https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/setup/installation.html

Info that could help others help you:
House or flat?
Renting or owning?
How large an area do you need to heat?
How many rooms?

Temperature and savings:
Where I live they say that a house with people living in it should be at least 16°C (~60°F) to handle the moisture we generate.
Humans should have at least 18°C (64°F), preferably 20°C (68°F).
That means that you could close doors and let unoccupied rooms have lower temperature than the rooms you use.
If you’re stuck with space heaters then you’ll save quite a lot that way.

OpenWrt with 802.11r and 802.11s configured will work as a mesh network with roaming functionality.
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/mesh/80211s
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/roaming

Not many Ruckus devices that are supported though:

Brand - Model - Supported Version
Ruckus - ZF7025 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7321 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7341 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7343 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7351 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7352 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7363 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7372 - 23.05.2

https://openwrt.org/toh/start?toh.filter.supportedcurrentrel=22.03|23.05

Software: OpenWrt - https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/roaming
Devices: Supported devices found here - https://openwrt.org/toh/start?toh.filter.supportedcurrentrel=22.03|23.05

pfsense and opnsense are very similar. The pfsense devs has acted like jackasses towards the opnsense gang. They are both great for a router/firewall/vpn device. I would use external access points with them.
I think there are more addons to pfsense than opnsense.

OpenWrt is great when it comes to WiFi, but I find it much less intuitive to use for router/firewall parts. Could be that I am used to the way pfsense and opnsense do things.

Neither do switching from what I know, so pair the router with a switch of your choice.

I’m so happy I went with a self-hosted Forgejo for my code repo.

Gonna check it out!
Is it easy to setup automatic responses to the alerts, f.e. restarting a service if it isn’t answering requests in a timely manner?
Have you used it together with Windows Servers too?

I’ve used SNMP a lot together with nagios so I should be able to handle it. :D

I’ll have a look! Cheers!

Cheers! I’ve heard of Prometheus/Grafana but VictoriaMetrics was a new one. Gonna look into it!

For signal I imagine you’ll find the best answers here:
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
https://community.signalusers.org/c/development/android-development/22

Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort.

I mean you have the same functionality in LibreOffice Calc, the automatic sorting and filtering is called AutoFilter and the table style is chosen from AutoFormat Styles.

If you go for SSD another thing to think about is the TBW on them. Buying a low endurance SSD might save some electricity but will cost more in SSDs over time. Example:
Crucial P3 Plus M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB (2.67W on your link) has 440TBW compared to Kingston Fury Renegade M.2 NVMe SSD Gen 4 2TB (4.92W on your link) with 2000TBW.
Those few watts you save on using the Crucial P3 Plus will be less than the extra cost in buying new SSDs earlier.
The site I checked TBW on has the Kingston Fury at $9.4 more than the Crucial P3 Plus.

I think proper datacenter 3.5’’ HDDs will give you the most efficient Wattage per TB disk space
Seagate Exos X20 Harddisk ST20000NM007D 20TB SATA-600 7200rpm is supposed to have
Power Consumption 5.4 Watt (idle) | 9.4 Watt (random read) | 6.4 Watt (random write)

Eatons batteries are usually really simple to switch, see
https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/products/backup-power-ups-surge-it-power-distribution/backup-power-ups/eaton-5s-ups/eaton-5s-120v-user-manual-700-1000-1500-lcd.pdf

For me they are meant for allowing a graceful shutdown in a powerout scenario and to protect the hardware behind them from power surges.

Figure out how much power your servers use on average with the help of a wattage meter, then enter that number and how many minutes battery backup you want in Eatons UPS Power Calculator to find a suitable unit. I’m sure other vendors have similar tools too.