This isn’t exactly an answer, but something like Baserow or NocoDB could be helpful. They’re self hosted versions of Airtable (if you’ve ever used that). Basically it’s a very fancy spreadsheet that can be used to do a ton of custom logic. If you can’t find software that fits your exact needs, chances are you could set something up with one of these! Good luck!

How would I check that?

Yeah seems like sandisk ultra is the way to go. Do you know, is there any disadvantage to using the “Ultra Fit” line of smaller drives that sit much more flush to the case? Those look nice, but IDK if there are performance issues with the smaller package

Yeah, sadly it does have a M.2 slot but it’s not SATA or NVMe, but instead SDIO. Someone out there has actually made an adapter that lets you put an sd card into that slot, which is super cool. But probably no better that a flash drive realistically, and much more expensive (you have to get the adapter manufactured)

Yeah, I have one of those and it’s great but I need very little storage for this system (64g max) so I didn’t feel like it made sense in this case.

I was thinking that too! I’ve basically never heard of anyone using it, but everyone here prompted me to check it out. Turns out they have a new version that’s a re-write in go which is neat. Just tried it out and… It’s not exactly good. UI at least is pretty broken haha

Still having trouble, but it might be because the service itself is unhealthy because I cant connect even directly with the ip. Something I’ve learned already about Seafile that I don’t love: debugging it is a massive pain. Why TF are the config files spread out across like 15 different python files lol. Seems like a crazy setup to me.

Oh this is huge. Just tested that out and it’s very cool. I need to figure out how to host it properly behind my reverse proxy though. Seems like it has nginx build in but that’s conflicting I think with my traefik that I put everything behind…

I run Tailscale which is basically the same a ZeroTier, so I theoretically could do this, but I’m not super enthused about having to put family members onto my VPN. I’d have to do some complicated networking stuff to keep things secure (aka make sure “normal” users don’t have access to machines and systems they shouldn’t). That said, I should look into it because if there is an easy way to do that, then this could be the simplest way

This sort of thing works fine for me, but falls apart a bit with non-technical users (aka my family). Even syncthing is actually pretty difficult to use IMO (compared to google drive or the like). I’d have to manually setup and maintain this on all their devices basically

Okay I’m trying out seafile and it seems awesome, so maybe that will be the way to go.

It stores them in a custom format in blocks, which is the only real downside because that means it can’t interop with things like FTP or SMB