Are all of those drives powered up constantly? What’s your power bill like?

Ah, yes, I live on “St Mary’ ; DROP TABLE street”

Consider how well Lotus Notes handles your form>…>messaging pipeline. Why aren’t we still using an evolution of that? There’s always a shiny new technology that promises to fix all of the problems of the previous ones.

Get a BeagleBoard! https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-ahead

Edit: or a Star64! https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/

Yes a back up is possible. Don’t back up partitions, back up the whole device. All 150+g at once.

Whenever you try to mount the device or the filesystems, make sure to mount it read-only so that no changes are written to the device.

Also, shrinking 84g of data into 32g is definitely not possible. Just changing the fdisk partition table doesn’t shrink or relocate the data. You need a filesystem-aware resizing tool to shrink the filesystem before shrinking the partition.

Hopefully you can just change the partition table back to the original values and get a clean fsck.

It probably won’t affect Fedora because that’s already a consumer-oriented distro. For me, it’s a philosophical question. Do you want to run a distro that is supported by a company who would behave that way?

What did you find in Fedora that you didn’t find in the other distros? Was it something about the graphical interface, or was it more about the system packaging ecosystem and developers?