Ah, in that case you will probably need to go into the container to do the backup. I avoid mounted volumes.

As your user account, just run something like:

podman volume export VOLUME >backup.tar

Or from another machine, say you want to do a remote backup from your server:

ssh user@host podman volume export VOLUME | zstd -o backup.tar.zstd

I think you have to go into desktop mode to find the setting to disable shader pre-caching but it’s 100% better with it disabled!

You can. I recommend making sure you have logging in place so you know what’s going on. This could include not just service logs but firewall logs as well. You might want to rate limit the connection attempts for SSH and WireGuard and consider Fail2Ban or something similar.

Yes, that’s one way to do it. Another way is to pick some amount you can afford to save and buy bitcoin every month or so. Hold it for a few years and always spend your oldest coins first. For example $20 from 2020 buys $200 worth of stuff now.