I’m a big fan of syncthing. It doesn’t rely on cloud services for storage, and can work 100% locally if you want it to.

It isn’t perfect. It has a model of running a web server for managing the service which is a little strange. Because it is not backed by any cloud storage it means you are on your own to make sure you keep your copies safe.

With those two issues understood, it is simple, fast, free, and and supported almost everywhere. I have it on my phone, laptop, desktop, and as a docker container on my NAS. Everything stays synced and the NAS does backups of the data.

Nobody: Me: This

/s

A neat feature in the new Death Stranding game is a “Pretend I Won” button on the death screen for bosses. It’s nice when games recognize that skill checks can be a problem, and what makes some games fun for some users isn’t being challenged.

It does, however, have a ton of fluff and filler.

There’s nothing saying you can’t have ports forwarded for the NAS, and have a VPN for everything else. Censorship may be a problem, but those more often block VPN services like NordVPN, not protocols. So running your own is less likely to be stopped. That said, of course comply with local laws, I don’t know where you live or what’s legal there.

If you really want multiple things exposed at the same time, you have two options(which can be used in combination if needed/wanted):

1. A reverse proxy. I use caddy. I give it a config file that says what address and port binds to what hostname, and I forward port 443/80 to it. That works great for web content.
2. Use custom ports for everything. I saw someone else walking you through that. It works, but is a little harder to remember, so good notes will be important.

I still recommend against forwarding a lot of ports as a beginner. It’s very common for software and web apps to have security vulnerabilities, and unless you are really on top of it, you could get hit. Not only does that put all your internal devices at risk, not just the one that was original breached, it also will likely become part of a botnet, so your local devices will be used to attack other people. I’d recommend getting confident with your ability to maintain your services and hardening your environment first.

I’ll be honest, if you aren’t planning on sharing with others, I’d recommend switching to something like wireguard to connect back into your house instead of exposing everything publicly. Some firewalls have wireguard built in, so you can setup the VPN easily. But then all you have to do is keep your VPN endpoint safe to keep your internal network protected from the Internet, instead of having to worry about the security of everything you expose.

The synology NAS can act as a reverse proxy for stuff inside your network. I don’t have mine in front of me, so you will have to google the steps, but basically you point the synology to an internal resource and tell it what external subdomain it should respond to.

I don’t know why you are asking me.

I use a KillaWatt device. It is a simple device you plug into the outlet and then plug the device you want to measure into it. I’ve had mine for a long time so I have no idea what a new one would cost, but I’m guessing sub $30.