A used older desktop is a good starting machine. I think Unraid is a good starting point as the community is more welcome to completely new people needing a lot of help. Also this channel has a tone of good guides for Unraid: https://youtube.com/@SpaceinvaderOne?si=A8BWLbMq42KzHD8I

I suggest starting off cheap to learn. Then you can spend money as you determine what is necessary based on problems you encounter. One VERY important thing to remember is that HDDs fail, power surges kill motherboards, water leaks kill the whole thing. If you don’t want to loose family photos, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE IT BACKED UP OFF YOUR SERVER. Preferably “off-site”.

Yes. The important detail is that it remounts the path once the path gets called. So I setup a cron job to “ls” the path every few minutes to make sure it’s always remounted quickly.

Try looking into “autofs”.

I think 2 good concepts come to mind to help you make choices:

1. Least privilege - Only give things/people just enough access/authority to get the job done. A good example is sonarr doesn’t need access to your personal photos to do it’s job, so don’t give it access if to them.
2. Defense in layers - Nothing is perfect and you can make mistakes in configuration. Don’t rely on a single point of failure to protect you. If you want remote access use a VPN. But also take steps in your network like putting a password on the logins.

If you want cheap new drives check out https://shucks.top/.

You can get used Enterprise drives on eBay if you want to got that way. Look for a seller with lots of sales, a good rating, and a reasonable return policy.

Same

I would stay away from kubernets/k3/k8s. Unless you want to learn it for work purposes, it’s so overkill you can spend a month before you get things running. I know from experience. My current setup gives you options and has been reliable for me.

NAS Box: Truenas Scale - You can have UnRaid fill this role.

Services Hosting: Proxmox - I can spin up any VMs I need and lots of info online to do things like hardware passthrough to VMs.

Containers: Debian VM - Debian makes a great server environment as it’s stable and well supported. I just make this VM a docker swarm host. I managed things with Portainer for a web interface.

I keep data on the NAS and have containers access it over the network. Usually a NFS share.

If you are interested in a web interface for management check out portainer.

A VPN is going to offer better security. I would only use cloudflare if you need something to be open to the public. This is useful when you have non-technical users that aren’t going to understand using a VPN.