I’ve also found the Raspberry RP2040 to be a very good option for low-cost micro-controller development (also comes with optional Wi-Fi support, so can be used for ESP32-esque IoT based operations). The datasheet and board development documents are extremely detailed, and it is a first-class target for CircuitPython and Arduino-based development.

The programmable state machine / PIO functionality is a feature that particularly stands out to me. You get some of the functionality of the FPGA (albeit extremely limited by comparison to actual FPGAs) at a fraction of the cost.

Kopia to Backblaze B2 is what I generally use for off-site backups of my devices. Borg’s another good option to look at, but not as friction-less in my experience. There are a couple of additional features that are available in Kopia that are nice to have and are not in Borg (i.e. error correction, file de-duplication) from what I recall. edit: borg does do de-duplication

This post seems like it’s more about OP having an ideological axe to grind with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Which is fine - they (and Broadcom, by extension) have made a few tactical errors in the past.

I’d still consider them an overall force of good, especially when the majority of the low-cost SBC market appears to be saturated with Rockchip-based boards with little to no support for mainline Linux.

The arguments about power usage and software compatibility seem to be a bit disingenuous, however. Except for low-power Intel Atom/Ryzen Embedded offerings, vast majority of x86(_x64) platforms are going to consume a lot more power for roughly equivalent performance as more recent ARM counterparts. Most common self-hosted services usually do have ARM binary/image distributions.