Dragonish

Welcome! Without buying more enclosures and increasing the number of drives you can access at one time, you will need to partition your files based on your own use case and maintain an index so that you easily can retrieve the right drive when you need to access data. Perhaps you get a drive for each year. Perhaps images go to one and video to another. perhaps you split on the file name. For an index, this can be as simple as labeling the drives and putting them on your shelf. As mentioned by others, there are software solutions for indexing file metadata as well.

If you buy more enclosures you can use MergerFS or another union file system to bring both disks together and provide a single view while using ext4 for each drive. This allows you to easily remove a single drive and plug it into another basic linux distro, but you will not get any data striping or other protections. So if 1 drive dies, you will loose whatever data was stored on that disk. Because of that, I advise you to still think about partitioning your files even if you union them so that you understand your failure scope.

my understanding is that terms of service would be helpful but not needed if someone trued to sue because you blocked access to the site. I would not expect ToS for a site like you are explaining, but if it did it would say “the web admin will ban you if you are naughty, you have been warned”

For privacy policy i think what you wrote to give us context is near perfect. Explain how your app stores data, be specific about encryption at rest and in motion. If your app is designed to hold name, email address, billing info you should highlight that in your policy. including a (monitored) contact email for questions would be nice, but not needed imo unless you are storing PII

Clouds and Feuds from Age Of Wonders

To expand with my personal experience, I self host a synapse server partly for the reason that i want my children (aged 8-14 now) to have a communication platform they can access to get ahold of me with out requireing a sim card. I do not federate, and i do not allow account sign ups. That keeps a pretty isolated instance while still allowing everyone on that homeserver to be able to talk to each other.

I help them get Element setup on each device. I dont think this is overly complicated, but i am sure i am a horrible judge of complexity… They have to enter the url of the server, then their password, then they need to scan a qr code/verify from an existing device. Or, they need to enter a second passcode to verify their identity. I help them keep those secrets in bitwarden, so imo, that complexity is an opportunity to explain some opsec and encryption!

VS Code’s extension system makes it pretty easy to build your own code snippet extension. I use my own private extension to easily “generate” different types of markdown files (ie readme vs a troubleshooting guide) from my personalized snippets.

I agree that data staleness is a limiting factor. Depending on your needs and technical proficiency you could use use their zimit service (limited in the number of links it follows). The zimit tool is oss and on github, so you can run the it yourself to keep the sites you are interested in up to date in your local kiwix

While not a solution right now, I just want to add that the general transit feed spec aims to solve the data interoperability of different transit systems. The transit system keeps a publicly accessible zip file up to date, and then anyone can pull/parse the schedule/prediction data in a consistent way across transit systems. I know in the us adoption is slow, with vendors prefering to build their own walled gardens and transit agencies lacking the vocabulary or skills to advocate for more open data/tools