Octoprint is what I use. Slicing is probably the thing it woukd be least good at but all the rest is good. And theres an api to write plugins for if youre into that sort of thing.

You are correct that this is technically in code and would protect against shock hazards in a neutral error situation but you also get the opportunity for the outlet to pop during the day when nobody is home and the battery to die.

We had a situation in our old house where someone who was technically correct but didn’t think it through had a gfci outlet upstream of the refrigerator outlet. Thankfully it popped while someone was home and we got everything corrected before we lost everything in the fridge.

1. The order doesnt matter as long as they are the same drives, you dont have a usb dock or raid card in front of them (ie sata/sas/nvme only)and you have enough of them to rebuild the array. Ideally all of them but in a dire situation you can rebuild based on 2 out of 3 of a Raid Z1

2. You can do that, you shouldn’t but you can. I’ve done something similar before in a nasty recovery situation and it worked but don’t do it unless you have no other option. I highly recommend just downloading the config file from your current truenas box and importing it into a fresh install on a proper drive on your new machine.

3. Sort of already mentioned it but you can take your drives, plug them into your new machine. Install a fresh Truenas scale and then just import the config file from your current setup and you should be off to the races. Your main gotcha is if the pool is encrypted. If you lose access to the key you are donezo forever. If not, the import has always been pretty straightforward and ive never had any issues with it.

4. Lots of people virtualize truenas and lots of people virtualize firewalls too. To me, the ungodly amount of stupid edge cases, especially with consumer hardware that break hardware passthrough on disks (which truenas/zfs needs to work properly) is never worth it.

I actually run mine in a 12 year old castoff Thinkpad. 4 GB ram total. More than enough to run it because I run a DNS server, a dashboard and a speedtest server on the same machine.

All I see around is old Cisco enterprise stuff and 1000 would be a low price for that. Not to mention the potential for quite loud fan noise.

Unifi has one with 10 gig uplinks for the same price as used Cisco stuff and it has poe also. Still 1600 bucks though.

I use Syncthing on all my endpoints Windows and Linux (can’t speak for Mac) to sync to my TrueNAS server. It has a built in tool to just back up to backblaze on a certain schedule.

I know you can use Syncthing with unraid in Docker. I have it set up so sync all endpoints to my server and then the server pushes the latest changes back to all the endpoints. This is overly redundant and you don’t have to do it that way but all endpoints and my server would have to die at the same time before I lost any data. It’s sort of a backup scheme in and on itself.

I use Heimdall. You can set it up in no time with docker compose and manage it all through the web interface after that.

Its simple but also has some neat integrations with certain apps and will give live stats for certain things. Like pihole gives you live stats on what’s being blocked for instance.

https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-heimdall

Not sure I fully understand your question or goal but you might benefit from setting up NAT reflection for your public stuff so when you are inside your nat you can still access everything with your external domain name like you are on the Internet. I see some people referencing split DNS also and that goes along with nat reflection.

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/nat/reflection.html

There is a link to how you set it all up using pfsense.