Should be fine, just don't cheap out on the external drive / cable you will be using. And when you're using something like smartctl you'll know right away if SMART info is passing through your USB for proper testing.

I've done a lot of these type of scans via USB drives, honestly the more annoying part is that some USB drives do wonky things like go into sleep mode within 1-5 minutes which will disrupt any sort of scanning you had going. So with USB drive scanning I usually implement something to keep the drive alive and awake e.g. a simple infinite loop script to write a file every x seconds, or if you're on windows you can also use KeepAliveHD.

is there anything you would recommend?

You'd need to donate via whatever means they accept donations, it's not something you get to choose yourself. Unless you meant that you are going to keep contacting FOSS projects to ask them to set up new donation methods?

Personally I donate via crypto or other means that they allow donations via credit card (Liberapay / Ko-Fi work well IMO) . No Paypal/Venmo since I can't use those services - some FOSS projects I don't donate at all if they only accept Paypal.

however I can still seed the torrent how is that possible?

Yes you can still seed as well as download. But you are limited and can only upload and download torrent data in swarms that contain peers that are themselves fully connectable (port forwarded).

So say you join a torrent swarm that only contains peers just like you (firewalled, no ports forwarded) then no one will transfer any torrent data with each other. Everyone is stuck waiting for a fully connectable (port forwarded) peer to join that swarm.

FYI all the official domains and .onion link are on their proxygalaxy page

https://proxygalaxy.me

For what it's worth .to does not forward me to .mx, each of those domains seem to work fine on their own. Not sure what exactly is happening with your browser, maybe try clearing the cache / doing a hard reload.

Hmm just tried it & it doesn't load either. The last official onion link I found published on https://proxygalaxy.me (via archive.org) was in May 2024 at http://galaxy3yrfbwlwo72q3v2wlyjinqr2vejgpkxb22ll5pcpuaxlnqjiid.onion but it doesn't seem to load for me in Tor Browser.

I tried creating my own torrent and was able to dl it on another device, but on her machine it stayed at 0% and wouldn’t let me connect to seed

At least one of the torrent clients needs to be fully connectable (port forwarded) for torrents to transfer data. You need to test that e.g. test your torrent client's incoming connection port with a port test website like https://www.canyouseeme.org, https://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports, etc. & make sure those port test websites can successfully test connect to your torrent client's incoming connection port. If the test fails then you need to look at opening the port via your OS firewall and/or router firewall.

Is FTP a good option? I set up a proxmox server last night but I don’t really know what I’m doing yet

Probably best to avoid FTP if you don't know what you're doing, it's not all that secure.. you'd want to at least configure SFTP or FTPS which is just going to be more complicated vs fixing your torrent issues. And technically you still need to make those connectable (port forwarded) too, just like your torrent client.

All that aside it's probably easier to use Syncthing if you can't get the torrent working.

You could also try one of those file transfer websites that use WebRTC to transfer data peer to peer e.g. https://file.pizza or similar. Not sure how well they work for huge amounts of data but their github page mentions that Firefox is better for that, apparently Chrome starts to choke with data 500+ MB.

Wow, time sure flies by! A whole bunch of people here (including me) were in that wave exiting Reddit at the time, we're all hitting that 1 year mark around this time.

The instance has been going great thanks to all the admins & mods keeping things running. Looking forward to more years here :)

Nowadays I buy digital music (mostly via Bandcamp but there's also HDTracks, Qobuz, etc.) & play the music that way. Can also stream my own music library if I want via Jellyfin or other applications.

re: physical CDs, yes I've got a ton of those too from before you could buy digital music but have already ripped them. Haven't had a need to touch the physical discs in years but still keep them in CD binders just in case.

Also not sure if it matters but for me I'm always living in small apartments/rooms so I absolutely avoid collecting physical items, there's just no space for that.

You might be confusing public IP addresses with ports? If your torrent client doesn't have a public IP address that just means it's offline / no internet. Maybe your internet is down or the VPN is disconnected. You're won't torrent anything at all in that state.

One side of the connection needs a ~~public address~~ open port, not both. When both parties don’t have a ~~publicly addressable IP~~ open port, ~~the status is firewalled. I guess~~ they can "see" each other but are unable to exchange any torrent data.

For what it's worth in the situation where both peers don't have open ports (meaning they are both firewalled) they end up having to wait for another peer to join that torrent swarm that happens to have a open port, that's the only way any data will exchange in that swarm. Until that happens those two peers will sit there waiting and not exchanging data.

So your saying it should have never worked even if I was not using docker?

Correct.

Also it’s now working… I have no idea

Yeah that's weird, I don't know if you accidentally found a way to hack Windscribe into temporarily giving you a port forward on their free plan. But otherwise you do need to be a paid member on their Pro account for that feature.

Or it's just going to randomly stop working again.

Is there a way to actually test your port forward within Docker? I'm not familiar enough with that configuration to suggest anything but maybe someone else knows about that. Usually without Docker I'd just start up the torrent client & then use a web browser with any port test website (https://www.canyouseeme.org, https://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports, etc.). But for Docker not too sure how to go about that.

Mullvad does not have port forwarding so it would be normal for your torrent client to be firewalled.

I'm not too sure why you & OP sometimes see it as temporarily connectable when changing/randomizing the incoming port when the VPN service never provided you an open port forward.

I have never done any kind of manual port forwarding my current VPN provider does not do that at the price I have it for right now.

If the VPN provider does not support port forwarding then it is normal and expected to always be firewalled. Toggling random ports doesn't change that fact.

Not sure why you would sometimes see your status as fully connectable, guessing either it's a Windscribe misconfiguration when you initially connect (?) or qBittorrent gets confused during the intitial connect. Or there's some other misconfiguration.

You might want to see if other people using that VPN provider have more insight, maybe they are doing something strange with the ports when you initially connect & eventually close them on you.