droolio

BiglyBT for manual dls on desktop, qBittorrent with the arrs

100% this. OP, whatever solution you come up with, strongly consider disentangling your backup 'storage' from the platform or software, so you're not 'locked in'.

IMO, you want to have something universal, that works with both local and 'cloud' (ideally off-site on a own/family/friend's NAS; far less expensive in the long run). Trust me, as someone who came from CrashPlan and moved to Duplicacy 8 years ago, I no longer worry about how robust my backups are, as I can practice 3-2-1 on my own terms.

While you can do command line stuff with CloneZilla, I think what they're referring to is the TEXT-based guided user interface, which doesn't seem to differ much at all to the Rescuezilla GUI, which only looks marginally prettier. However, there's a few other useful tools in there, and a desktop environments, so it's still a bit nicer to use.

Yep, I guess it depends on how much data of interest is on the drive. You can hook it up to dmde with a ddrescue/OpenSuperClone-mounted drive, which can let you index the filesystem while it streams content to the backup image. It reads and remembers sectors already copied, and you can target specific files/folders so you don't have to touch most of the drive.

You should take it to a data recovery specialist if the data is really really important but for lightly-damaged sectors, you want ddrescue (oldie but goodie) or HDDSuperClone (no longer developed) or OpenSuperClone (fork of HDDSuperClone, more actively developed).

You can combine some of these tools with commercial programs like dmde, UFS Explorer, or R-Studio - to target specific files for a quick result - but basically it's best to get a full disk image off the bad drive onto another drive/image.

No that's either HDD Regenerator or SpinRite. Clonezilla is a sector-by-sector disk imaging program. (SpinRite et al are good for keeping old drives running for longer but if you want to do data recovery and really value your data, ddrescue or HDDSuperClone is what you want.)

It's good enough for recent releases (note you may have to open a port for passive XDCC) but because it's not easy to automate, even public trackers + *arrs (w/ VPN) are just more convenient.

Occasionally you might find releases on IRC and not on public trackers, and visa versa, so it's good to have a backup. I prefer scene releases so it's easy to find specific stuff with the xdcc search sites (e.g. dot eu and sun), and maybe a 'lil help from srrdb to verify CRCs.

Don't forget, you can also use SRV records to point a domain to another target, where you can also omit the port number. So connecting to server.org say, can point to mc.server.org:25565 under the hood.

This prolly isn't what hypixel are doing as everything's likely on the same network and their router/firewall is just forwarding traffic onto different machines, but SRV is one way to redirect a minecraft connection (and you could combine the technique with subdomains).

Suppose one way around it would be to rent a cheap VPS in the UK and piggy back off the connection?

Otherwise, there's a s2 'NORDiC' version going around which is actually in English audio - just with various scandiwegian soft subs, so it's defo out there. DM me if you still struggle to find it.

More people should use BiglyBT and its Swarm Merging feature. You get the ability to seed or download chunks from peers across separate torrent files.

It's a shame because if more people used it, the BiglyBT devs might add hash-based merging (with v2 torrents) instead of just size-based. Hybrid/v2 merging is still possible, but file size is less reliable and caters to files only larger than 50MB.

Some kinda auto v1/v2/hybrid private<->public torrent maker plugin for BiglyBT would be... bigly.

If qBittorrent/qb-nox is bound to your VPN interface, then 1) your VPN needs to support port forwarding, and 2) forwarding a port on your router is pointless and unnecessary. Your only way around it is to switch VPN or don't use VPN and then port forward.

Actually, ufw has its own separate issue you may need to deal with. (Or bind ports to localhost/127.0.0.1 as others have stated.)