I’m not familiar with the brand, but general ideas that come to mind to troubleshoot are:
This sums it up. I’m too lazy and there’s too little incentive.
I use rsync for this purpose and the only notable bottleneck is my download speed, fwiw.
Speaking as an atheist, can confirm.
Apology not needed.
I agree with you. The ozone layer is a great example of this being successful. And there are other examples of this kind of issue elsewhere. Like the we have to push for user repair rights or against planned obsolescence (which one could argue this is planned obsolescence, in thinking about it).
A small number of informed users won’t disincentiveize companies from abusing the masses. Because most companies are garbage so of course they will if they can. And regulations are the solution. I’m not suggesting we ignore that. But those of us who are informed can still incentiveize those companies that do treat their customers well in the interim.
I concede to the point though. I said, in effect, that supporting businesses that treat us well will help. But I suppose it’s more accurate to say that will, at best, stop things from getting worse.
Setting legal precidents and regulating the industry are musts to curb this behavior. But we also have power as consumers. The ol’ “vote with money” if you will. There are too many uninformed consumers for this to have a huge impact, but keeping our money away from bad publishers and giving it to good ones will help.
I use mailfence. They offer imap, caldav, and carddav. It’ll check all those boxes, but I don’t think those are unique offerings among the privacy respecting email services.
I use Proton Mail’s Proton Calendar app for my calendar though. I was using caldav + davx5 but I had issues with reminder settings getting lost on recurring events.
My suggestion just changes your threat model, so may not be a good one based on your wants.
Perhaps consolidate systems? Managing less devices = less points of failure. But adds the risk of any given failure being more severe.
Some suggestions for solid state alternatives as old mechanical magnetic storage has such a high failure rate. But retro whatever way you want, of course!
You can get ide to compact flash or ide to sata adapters and get some reasonably modern solid state hard drive storage in there, if that interests you. I understand (haven’t tried personally) that compatibility can be kind of a crapshoot though.
You can also get a gotek which has a floppy interface and can load floppy images from a USB thumbdrive. Which might be a more functional option than getting a USB floppy drive for a modern machine.