As part of my preparation to move back to the US, I’m about to retire my server and downsize—by moving my hard drives over to a USB RAID enclosure, which I can actually bring with me.

Why? Keeping this running isn’t practical due to slow speeds when accessing it outside my network because of CG-NAT. And I don’t think we’re getting IPv6 anytime soon to solve that. I mean, it takes me at least 5 minutes just to access a single pic. And maintenance is another thing, considering I’ll be gone for a year at least. If anything goes south, I’m SOL.

Yes, it’s bittersweet. But it is what it is.

And I don’t know what my internet situation will be in America. I’m planning to rent a room, meaning that I may not even have full access to a router. So, my safe bet right now is to just use the drives as a USB hard drive—at least I can access it directly from my laptop.