I’m not sure how it will work, but if you’re worried, just move the download folder before you remove it from within the application. Better yet, if you have the space, just copy the folder somewhere else.
Hopefully someone else has a better answer for you.
This is one of the reasons docker is so great. If you were running the application in docker, you would have mounted that folder as a volume, so if you wanted to move it you’d just stop the container, move the folder, edit your compose file to point to the new location, restart, and from the application’s point of view nothing will have changed.
I’ve been using linux for a long time, and I have a background in this kind of stuff, but it’s not my career and I don’t keep as current as if it was, so i’m going to give my point of view on this.
A zfs array is probably the legit way to go. But there’s a huge caveat there. If you’re not working with this technology all the time, it’s really not more robust or reliable for you. If you have a failure in several years, you don’t want to rely on the fact that you set it up appropriately years ago, and you don’t want to have to relearn it all just to recover your data.
Mergerfs is basically just files on a bunch of disks. Each disk has the same directory structure and your files just exist in one of those directories on a single disk, and your mergerfs volume shows you all files on all disks in that directory. There are finer points of administration, but the bottom line is you don’t need to know a lot, or interact with mergerfs at all, to move all those files somewhere else. Just copy from each disk to a new drive and you have it all.
Snapraid is just a snapshot. You can use it to recover your data if a drive fails. The commands are pretty simple, and relearning that isn’t going to be too hard several years down the road.
The best way isn’t always the best if you know you’re not going to keep current with the technology.
Switching to porkbun would make things a lot easier for you. DNS challenge is why I switched from Namecheap, and it’s less expensive and considerably easier to administrate.
A, great. Overly complicated. B, wireguard lets you set your allowed IPS to your networks’s subnet so you only tunnel that traffic. C, that’s ideal. Use nginx proxy manager. It’s super simple. Buy a domain and you can use letsencrypt for SSL so you don’t get http nag messages from your browser. Old suggest something with cheap renewals like ‘.rodeo’ or ‘.top’. D, there are many right ways. Personally, i’d set up your services in a docker compose file, all behind gluetun as a VPN for your torrent service. I’d set up a wireguard VPN on a pi zero elsewhere on your network so you can access everything from outside, and on your wireguard clients i’d only tunnel the traffic to your network’s subnet. Unless you want everything behind the same VPN you use for torrenting. In that case i’d run a wireguard service in the same docker network as gluetun, so you can tunnel all your client traffic through that. You could even out a dns server in there as well, and manually set a domain name to your server’s ip so you don’t have to buy a domain name. Course, then you can’t use letsenceypt SSL.
They’re largely autisticly coded, and we don’t generally lie, to the extent that it causes us problems. So I’d guess people are picking up on the coding.
If you want to be able to grow, check out mergerfs and snapraid. If you’re wanting to use a pi and USB drives it’s probably more what you’re wanting than zfs and raid arrays. It’s what i’m using and I’ve been really happy with it.