Do you waffle about before taking a slipper to the roach that snuck in under your door-jamb? No, you smash that repugnant shit and scoop it up with a piece of junk mail to toss it in the toilet. That sentient bug is just not food to you. The fact that a lobster is food does not make it a more elevated being.

Yes, they feel every moment until the knife slices their pea-sized nerve center of a brain in half. That took about 1/2 of a second. It’s done and now we can eat.

This is a left/right thing?!! WTF? This just a food thing and if you are left/righting it you are a world-class dolt!

It’s a fucking bug! Boil it and eat the shit already.

I worked at Red Lobster for a number of years as a young’un. A large part of my work in the prep kitchen initially (after I graduated from the dish ring) was to slice live Maine lobs in half to make “princess lobsters” (half a lobster with body cavity stuffed with yummy). These stupid bugs are no more sentient than a cockroach that you smash with a shoe.

Why would anyone spend even a second considering the feelings of a fucking bug?!

“A woman is only fertile during about 5 days each lunar cycle. Unfortunately those days are the most fun but the other 24 are safer.”

Can confirm that these are the best days to get wiggy with it - ask me how I know…kids.

Fair enough, I knew my take wouldn’t be a popular one here. In all fairness if you are using Apple products the iCloud sync brings all of the metadata with the data on every device that accesses it.

While I don’t have any illusions that Apple has my back they do have a lot invested in keeping people’s trust in their ecosystem. The automated on-device CSAM scanning kerfuffle that they backed away from shows that they are sensitive to the threat of people leaving their walled garden.

Another fairly easy to implement local solution that wouldn’t be an admin headache is to put a Mac mini with a bunch of attached storage on the network and use it as a file server. I do that for my PleX.

This will be an unpopular suggestion here but why not just go all in on iCloud? It’s reasonably inexpensive for not data-hoarding amounts of data, reasonably secure and E2E encrypted. Given the low cost, zero setup if they’re already Apple people and lack of admin I think it is ideal for them.

I pay for iCloud storage because I want HomeKit Secure Video cloud storage (I also have a local copy on disk).

Regarding your myQ, get away if you can. You can find an inexpensive HK device from Meross that will likely work for you.

If you want to use HA then you will end up migrating all of your HK devices to be paired with HA and then you can bridge them all (and more) back to HK so your family does not have to learn anything new.