if you need more reliability you can always use a second mailserver as backup, add a second mx record to your domain and if the first one is not responding the second one will be used. there is no limit of how many next servers there can be specified afaik.

have mine running for nearly 20 years now and never had any major issues with delivery 🤷

still steam prevents you from running more than one game at once from one account. can’t start vampire survivors on the deck and play manor lords on the other pc using the same account. family sharing and using multiple accounts should work, though 🤔

you can just set your pihole as the dns server for all your wireguard clients i guess

i self host my mails for almost 20 years now, it was hard work in the beginning, now it’s just a few updates a year. no problem with blacklists or anything, a good hoster is probably beneficial, 10/10 would recommend, even just to learn how all of this works

my storage machine is luggage, and i use discworld names that kind of are relevant to the gunction for everything else in my network, too. my robot vacuums name is lu-tze for example.

have you heard about immich? it’s a bit ‘heavy’, too, but that’s because it’s not just a photo backup solution but aims to be a self-hosted multi-user replacement for google photos.

any alternative to vault you know of?

because it’s new

i think there is no limit (at least on the software side), because it’s local network only, so nothing is uploaded to a server but directly to the recipient. i could be wrong though.

they already have been around for a long time, i used them for about 8 years (if i remember correctly), before switching to borgbase last years because of the notifications they can send you when no backup has happened for a specific time, which rsync.net can’t 😐

mailu and mailcow are also quite good

to your edit: rsync is a tool to copy/move files, borg is a backup utility. there are scripts that use rsync to create proper backups, but if you want to go by ‘more actively maintained’ you should look into how these scripts are maintained, not rsync itself.
on the other hand - borg is actively maintained, there even are releases in the last two days, one stable and one beta. it also fulfills your ‘encrypted backup’ requirement and has a versioned backups built in.
tl;dr comparing borg backup and rsync is comparing apples and oranges

back in the days of micro atx board i had a music server in my car to replace the radio that came with it.

oh, i didn’t know that, as i’m already in to deep in unifi appliances 😬

i think i remember that it was not required, but i would not be surprised if that has changed.

consodering that you would need a subscription for a ring doorbell (if i remember correctly) the 200€ for the storage device and the ~180€ for the doorbell would still be cheaper. i’d be surprised to see another alternative with the same features for less money or without a aubscription.

unifi has nice (a) doorbell(s). you need a server to record and run the controller though, but that can be a raspberry pi