If you don’t mind horror, I would definitely recommend SOMA. It’s also one of those games where it’s best to go in blind. If you are interested, do yourself a favour and do not look at any spoilers before playing.

Lots to think about.

Thanks for the tips and your measurements!

I know of protectli, but I wouldn’t consider it a low-budget option. I mean it is reasonably cheap, but I was hoping I could get away with some much cheaper used hardware.

Thanks, never heard of Zimaboard, sounds interesting

Thanks for these insights! Gigabit is of secondary priority at the moment, just a nice to have. Maybe in the future I would break things up even more and have a dedicated firewall with minimal resources, then this machine I am planning on getting now would be a dedicated OpenBSD based server for proxying, load balancing, etc (basically everything I can do easily on OpenBSD without docker) and finally I would also have a stronger box for several docker services.

Wouldn’t there generally be a significant power draw difference between an SFF and a smaller (micro, mini, SBC…) machine?

Thanks, I haven’t considered ThinkCentres much yet. I should have mentioned that I am located in Central Europe, so I am a bit more limited on options where I can get hardware. I am a bit worried about shipping costs when ordering from abroad.

I found an offer for an M700 tiny with an i5-6500T, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and an SSD included, for €120. Is that in a similar ballpark as the M720q you mentioned?

Honestly, I don’t think I am likely to find 8th gen i5 boxes in my area (haven’t seen any adverts so far).

It’s kind of broken at the moment, but I have set up duplicity to create encrypted backups to Bacblaze B2 buckets.

Of course the proper way would be to back up to at least 2 more locations. Perhaps a local NAS for starters. Also could be configured in duplicity.