@janusfox @frosty I got it, setup the community self hosted server, printed a nice case and after hacking in an oversized battery it now lives on my wall. It's quite neat, you can just write a display in html with some convenience functions and organize it into playlists that you can control through the server software. The device then wakes up on a set schedule, the server generates the bitmap and the screen displays it and goes to sleep.The documentation is a bit all over the place, but once you enable the official ruby renderer and use the actual 2 bits of grey depth the panel has instead of just raw dithering, it becomes quite pleasant.

For 45$ this is an absolute steal for the panel alone lmao.

@Ylfingr @janusfox zfs handles it fine, it'll just be limited to the capacity of the smallest drive used (so if we got 1x 8TB and 3x 20TB then zfs will just use 8TB on all 4 disks in one 4 disk pool).

zfs does allow the gradual upgrades of disks and expansion of the pool. So in the above example if the 8TB drive was replaced with another 20TB one, then the pool can grow to use 20TB on all drives.

Also with the newer zfs versions one can even expand existing raidzN pools by just adding more drives of the same or larger capacities, and or replacing drives one by one with larger ones and growing it that way. zfs is awesome and I haven't had any data loss or major issues in the 6 years I've been using it.

And all the cool features like transparent compression, snapshots, incremental sends, scrubs and so much more make it honestly the best filesystem for multi disk arrays.

(When I tried btrfs it killed itself after 2 power cuts, meanwhile my zfs pools survived abuse that words cannot describe).

@frosty @janusfox there is this thing that was released recently:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/TRMNL-7-5-Inch-OG-DIY-Kit-p-6481.html
It's quite a reasonable price for such a large e ink panel and it's compatible with the fairly easy to use TRMNL firmware and software. You can either self host the controller on your own hardware or pay a one time 50$ activation fee to use their cloud thing. (You can also build it with different e-ink modules the docs specify the supported panels and boards).

It lets you to include standard web pages/html that gets rendered and the screenshot of that gets pushed to the display every few minutes. There is even an official one to do that from HA directly apparently: https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-home-assistant

I ordered mine a while ago and can let you know how it goes once I receive it and play with it.

@janusfox email is a pretty standard one, but also https://ntfy.sh/ is quite nice (self host able options available) since you can send notifications with just one curl command.

I just have it set up to send me the output of "zpool status" every week. You could be more fancy and parse to see if there is a failure and only then send stuff out but oh well...

@jackemled I was considering starting an ftp server (pyftpdlib is great for quick and dirty one time servers) but it sounded too silly in my mind so I didn't. (As if whatever I ended up doing wasn't silly as well).

But yeah rsync might be a good approach for incremental backups