I’ve been using a raid1 btrfs pool to store offline backups for around 10 years. It’s 4 rotating drives (2x4TB+2x12TB). I replaced / rebalanced 3 disks with larger / newer ones already (went fine). I identified a bad usb/sata controller, and lots of bitrots on one old disk (scrub was able to correct a few thousands errors).

I’m getting around 80MB/s read/write throughput (not great but OK for offline backup). I’m able to mount it on low-powered / low-memory devices (not the case for ZFS). Scrub takes around 2 days IIRC (for around 10TB of actual data), so I run it once a year.

I keep it simple and thus am not using advanced features (dedup / encryption / snapshots / subvolumes / raid5/6/10). So far its a good match for my needs.

Hi, what’s wrong with Briar?

It’s not clear to my why you absolutely don’t wan’t to expose your home port.

From a security standpoint, you are still exposing your services to the public anyway (only the TCP stack is not, which is likely the smallest attack surface).

If you had a simpler reverse-proxy VPS, it would still hide your home server IP from clients. Your ISP would still only see encrypted traffic (https). Since you use adguard already, you can target dns-over-https upstreams to hide all DNS traffic too (eventually have a firewall rule to block outgoing dns queries if you don’t trust your application).

You could host a Tor relay node (or an i2p node). These networks need crowd and bandwidth.