Yup, *arrs actually warn you about that so I fixed it before I started downloading anything.

Hardlinks aren’t a big issue for me but does explain how I had a bunch of “deleted” items in my plex folder when I migrated recently - I must have only deleted the qbittorrent (or plex) inode and left the other to get imported

some private trackers won’t let you use uTorrent either, good.

idk about others but at least with freedns you get 25 subdomains for free and obviously risk clashing names under the same shared domain.

freedns is good too but I ended up buying my own domain the other day for like 4 quid and now all my services get a much nicer name and unlimited DNS records

I think this depends on your tracker. For digitalcore, they expect you to be seeding for X amount of time but after that you’re good. I don’t think ratio is super important for them but it may be others.

They also have an IRC that increases your freeleech as long as you idle in it. When I started I accidentally did a few Hit-and-runs and my freeleech was low so I just logged in with a client I set up to autostart with my OS, which sorted it quickly enough.

Once you get a few torrents permanently seeding (even if it’s slow!) you build up enough freeleech to not ever have to worry - it’s self sustaining for me now.

Cant answer for them, but if you use dietpi they have use the debian package set up with scripts to pull dependencies like a webserver and database automatically. It was very painless in my experience.

Good point!

In terms of pricing, I find Hetzner is best for under 1TB, Backblaze for over 1TB. Both have great documentation for setting up any number of backup methods (SFTP, SSH, Rsync, Rclone, Borg, etc).

Rsync, Rclone, and Borg are all good options and some may be built into your choice of OS if you use a dedicated NAS system. Choose whatever is easiest for you.

The backups are gonna be encrypted in transit regardless of method, and Im pretty sure most backup providers encrypt data on their servers so you dont have to manage that I dont think.

When you commit to backups, IMO you should do them daily - Most backup clients have options for “sync” options which will ignore unchanged files and only upload changes, so a daily backup is not only more up-to-date but also more efficient once the first backup completes.

private trackers are the way. DigitalCore is one Im signed up for and it helps a bit with fleshing out my library.