Personally i have never experienced any of the issues you mention, but my Cryptomator vaults are also mostly below 1TB in size.
My local backup is also done with Arq backup to a local USB drive, though i have a long time test running with Kopia backing up to Minio on a Raspberry Pi.
I moved house recently and the only things I did were running CAT6 from where the internet enters the house, up to a PoE switch in the loft that then has a few Wifi6 APs connected to that.
Everything is wifi (all cameras, smart switches etc, office laptop, a single RPi4 for "projects" and so on) and all seems fine. The only device that is directly connected via ethernet is a headless gaming desktop that lives in the loft that I occasionally use for streaming games to a laptop.
But kudos for this guy if that is what he wants to do. Personally I did not enjoy doing the cable runs (especially for external-grade CAT6).
My "server" is also wired, as is my Hue Bridge, Tado Bridge and other "IoT" devices that doesn't support wifi, but when it comes to user accessible machines there is exactly one, which is my "go to" machine in case the router/switch dies and i can't get on the WiFi.
I also run a HomeBridge to bridge protect to Apple HomeKit, to have a backup of the footage.
Really curious how you set this up, sounds like it could be the perfect solution for me.
That's it, the entire network. Just enough storage to enjoy some media, the QNAP runs HomeAssistant (literally just to bridge some stuff to HomeKit) and Tailscale, and that's all I really need.
Translates to 50W.
Watts is the energy consumed "right now" (which is the product of Volt x Amps), but needs a time dimension to give a measure of historical consumption, which is where the Watt Hour (Wh) comes into play.
While most people are aware that X consumes Y Watts, few consider how much that addes up to over the course of days or weeks.
Few people are aware that a simple ethernet switch will roughly consume 1W per plugged in port, so an 8 port switch might consume 8-16W of power just sitting there, so 4-9 kWh/month.
My old homelab used to consume around 300W when idle, meaning it was consuming 300 * 24 * 30.5 = 219 kWh/month, and with electricity prices reaching €1/kWh, that suddenly becomes A LOT of money to have a Plex server available 24/7.
But that's my price of freedom.
My Synology NAS was failing. Saw that as a great opportunity to set up a proxmox box on a reasonably powerful used HP SFF, run TrueNAS on it. Plenty of time to get proxmox, TrueNAS, Gitea, a docker host, … just right.
It’s sat there with 4/16TB used, no real data transfer apart from TimeMachine from my Mac and my git server, sucking power at European rates.
Wish I hadn’t bothered, and had just gone with another Synology.
I have a similar setup with SFF running backups & ProxMox. However, I have smart plugs for my SFF and have a script to turn it on/off using cron (or on demand) from an always-on Pi. Wake on LAN would have worked too.
I'm considering making my Raspberry Pi the gateway proxy/"Load Balancer" to the SFF; turning it on if needed. It's trivial to proxy HTTP (Pi works as a Caddy-based proxy with long timeouts, powers on SFF in background if off. Things got trickier for proxying NFS & iSCSI)
The box is on another routed subnet - I wonder if I could firewall rule a “start” trigger.
These days i'm more pragmatic. I have exactly 2 wired machines, and everything else runs Wifi. The network "rack" is simply a firewall and a 16 port POE switch, everything else network related has been retired to the closet.
My NAS is gone. With electricity frequently going above €1/kWh last winter, it seemed like a bad idea to have a NAS sitting there, consuming ~35 kWh/month. Instead i spent about €20/month on cloud storage, and simply upload everything to the cloud (encrypted with Cryptomator), and i have redundant cloud storage (different provider) included in the cost which is where my backup goes.
All that's left at home is a small ARM based machine that handles making daily backups of my cloud data locally, as well as run a small Plex library on a single USB3 external drive.
Besides saving about half my previous electricity cost (as well as all the hardware cost!), i have gained SO MUCH spare time. My firewall is completely closed (save a wireguard VPN), and i no longer have to maintain anything except the normal patch routines.