Oracle (yes, the evil company) gives you one VPS for free

I hate that it’s oracle…

3.60 €/month is not bad. however i’d look for something even cheaper, given that the lowest plan gives 4 cores and 8gb of RAM, which I probably won’t need

You’re the only one giving me a positive answer!

I do not mind RAID, so i won’t lose data when a drive fails (the most valuable thing will be backups, which i mean, are backups, so not that critical if i can make a new one, but even losing other data would be a bit boring). I think I’d do software RAID tho, so if the controller breaks i wouldn’t have to find the same model, which could be hard for old hardware i guess.

the other comments scared me about power consumption, so i’ll have to investigate more of it.

Old desktop pc would be ideal, for exactly the problems you pointed out. The only thing that is making me consider this is the already included drives, which is where i’d end up spending most of my money (especially now, thanks ai)

I mean, the same capacity would cost WAY too much more. For a similar capacity + the system i’d have to spend at least double :(

yup, desktop components are what i was originally looking for, but this is 200 euros for a lot of storage, which would be way more expensive if i were to buy it separately

Do you have an estimate on the energy consumption?

Encrypting home is good (although full disk encryption is better and with mint it’s still easy enough)

Mint uses some helper scripts to mount/unmount your encfs, so maybe while trying to delete the files you deleted those too, and this would explain the login failing. It’s been a while tho so I’m not sure, better to wait for someone else.