What exactly do you want it to do? You can implement TOTP with a 10 line python script and I probably have a few of those kicking around. I’ve ended up doing that at least a couple of times.

Use a medic alert bracelet if you need something like that. EMTs are trained to look for it. They aren’t going to derp around looking at your phone.

I set up ZNC and got it working but it was a pain in the neck, took some trial and error, and the docs were confusing. Once I got it going I basically left it alone rather than try to clean up the situation.

It’s something of a “14 competing standards” situation, but uv seems to be the nerd favourite these days.

Oh man, what a mess. It is just not worth it if you’re only adding 1 or 2 TB. Also you don’t say what kind of data you want to store on this system. If it’s media files (static once written) that can simplify things.

I’d say don’t mess with external drives at all. Your simplest path is upgrade your 1TB internal SSD to 2TB or 4TB. Those aren’t too expensive, and you get SSD storage. Yes you may as well use LUKS unless you want to get fancier. I have some thoughts about key management but haven’t implemented them in practice, so talk about that would be theoretical.

RAID is for when you have data that changes, like databases where you frequently add rows or do updates, so you are up to date if a drive crashes just after an update. It also lets you keep the system running while you hot swap the crashed drive. If you don’t mind taking your storage offline while you restore from a backup, and you don’t mind having to recreate the most recent data, you don’t need RAID.

I simply keep my static stuff and backups on a Hetzner StorageBox, encrypted with Borg Backup. That eliminates all the hassles of RAID, buying hardware and keeping it at home, etc. I can remote mount it (read only) with sshfs with all cryptography happening on the client side (in practice I don’t do that very often). There’s no need to use an encrypted file system on the server, or for the server to ever see plaintext. Of course StorageBox is not self hosted, but you could do something similar with a bare iron storage server. Anyway I think it’s difficult to beat this for economy until you have tens or maybe 100’s of TB of data.