If we went NAS, I feel like maybe we could get away without the redundancy? Risky...
That's the thing, you could, but it wouldn't be best practice. At the end of the day the 3-2-1 rule applies to any data.
I know it's a hard pill to swallow, but ideally you'd need both a NAS (I'd go with Proxmox on a PC) and the tape backup for that NAS to ensure the safety of the data.
However. Backblaze may take the spot of the tapes - unsure if the NAS as well. Have a look at their offer and see what fits your budget. I would personally go with the NAS on site and backup it daily to Backblaze. Note that Backblaze B2 says something like 6$/TB/month which amounts to about 21600$/year which stings but then again it's safe and it's the best value (all the competition seems to be more expensive).
I feel called out on the number of open tabs but hey gotta put that RAM to good use.
Seriously now, if I'm researching something the number of tabs just explodes to several hundreds. To be in line with the data hoarder principles I do save and organise the data so it's accessible offline but damn it can become quite annoying to manage at some point.
I was just about to write you can spot them because they use spotify and netflix and other streaming services almost exclusively and if you ask them where that document is they have no clue and retrieve it from Excel's history.
He straight up told me that he despised his past
That is so sad :(
I still have all the memories (photos, etc) and when I open them I feel nothing but gratitude because even if they're not so happy memories I learned a lot from those experiences. We are all out past, not just what we like. "All sunshine makes a desert" say the arabs and they're definitely not wrong.
This is a bad idea. Why not use the Macbook for what it was designed, namely editing things instead of hosting things?
A run of the mill PC can run TrueNAS way more efficiently and everything in one box instead of having a laptop with tons of cables coming and going from it.
I feel that you should indeed take all your drives with the ISO collections somewhere safe. Linux ISOs are notorious to generate an unholy amount of attachment.