1. Things like changes to TOS or services can be seriously mitigated by hosting it yourself. WHat happens if Spotify changes the music they host or inserts ads into everything. Well for me, nothing. On the flip side, if some of my stuff goes down, kids and wife will bark. But honestly its mostly set it and forget it.

2. KISS is a thing that applies to many things in life. Anything “smart” in your home should ideally function without your “smart” features working. Ie: light switches should be dumb light switches if something breaks etc etc. Also dont get caught in using rack or enterprise gear. You can learn just as much using smaller, fatter desktops with bigger fans and air cooling over a power hungry rack servers with 80mm fans that blow your eardrums out. My entire lab runs on old dell workstations and raspberry pis’

3. https://www.servethehome.com/ -

Not free as in foss. But free as in beer.

You can use xpenology or just a synology disk station with active backup for business. It does quite well with windows and just runs in the background.

Before using that I use urbackup ,which is FOSS. It also worked quite well.