colebrodine

I'm not sure what kind of money you want to spend? The M2 Hat is ~$14 USD and a 2242 NVME SSD can be had for ~$30-$40 USD since you don't care as much about performance.

The USB to SATA adapter is going to run ~$10 USD and the SATA SSD drives are going to start ~$20 USD are go up from there depending on size, performance, etc.

If size of storage is an issue, the SATA SSD is probably the better route. I believe the NVME would be better performance since it utilizes the bus on the Pi more fully.

I would guess that for the money, most M2 drives and SATA SSD drives are going to be similar lifespans

Which Raspberry Pi do you have? There are some very reasonably priced M2 hats out there that you can boot from on the Pi 5, including the Raspberry Pi branded one.

What I wish existed was a self-hosted version of OurGroceries.

If you want self hosted, I'd second all the Grocy comments. I don't use it because it isn't simple enough for my family, but I did like it.

I once heard a consultant refer to it as "The Fog" because it's like a cloud that you're inside of. 🤮

I'm honestly not sure. I'm doing the same kind of research myself for a new home I'm building right now and happened to stumble across this guy's youtube channel. He does a lot of great smart home stuff. I haven't actually purchased one of them myself yet.

It's a year old video, but it still is pretty relevant I think.

Local Control Video Doorbells - Reolink, UniFi, Amcrest, Hikvision, Dahua. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XCu6L0xn4Y&t=904s

If you'd rather read than watch the video, he has a nice companion blog. https://www.thesmarthomehookup.com/local-control-video-doorbells-reolink-unifi-amcrest-hikvision-dahua/

And it's really not as good at being a space heater as an actual space heater. 🤣

It works great with my self-hosted NextCloud!

My oldest kid is a senior in highschool and is starting to show some interest in Linux and this kind of stuff. I'm hopeful that I can change my tune soon and maybe have one of the kids to share a hobby with!

I've told my wife and family that if something happens to me, they need to start migrating all their stuff off my self-hosted services to cloud services because its a matter of time before something fails and nobody's around who knows or cares to fix it.

I used to have this problem. I started pulling a version number (like 27) instead of "latest" so that I could just pull minor releases when I did updates, and then I manually step up the version in the docker-config file for major versions when I'm ready for them. (I don't like to pull a major release version until there's been 1 or 2 maintenance releases since my nextcloud is fairly critical for my family)

Depending on your budget and location, a whole house backup generator can be relatively inexpensive. My family lives in a very rural area in the central US, so we have a backup whole house generator that runs on propane. I chose propane because those motors seem to have less maintenance, plus we have propane for the grill, etc, already on site.