Why do you need the files in your local?
Is your network that slow?

I’ve heard of multiple content creators which have their video files in their NAS to share between their editors, and they work directly from the NAS.
Could you do the same? You’ll be working with music, so the network traffic will be lower than with video.

If you do this you just need a way to mount the external directory, either with rclone or with sshfs.

The disks on my NAS go to sleep after 10 minutes idle time and if possible I would prefer not waking them up all the time

I think this is a good strategy to not put additional stress in your drives (as a non-expert of NAS), but I’ve read the actual wear and tear of the drives is mostly during this process of spinning up and down. That’s why NAS drives should be kept spinning all the time.
And drives specifically built for NAS setups are designed with this in mind.

I had a similar case.
My minipc has a microSD card slot and I figured if it could be done for a RPI, why not for a mini PC? :P

After a few months I bought a new m2nvme but I didn’t want to start from scratch (maybe I should’ve looked into nix?)
So what I did was sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=1024k status=progress
And that worked perfectly!

Things to note:

• both drives need to be unmounted, so you need a live OS or another machine.
• The new drive will have the same exact partitions, which means the same size, so you need to expand them after the copy.
• PS: this was for a drive with ext4 partitions, but in theory dd works with the bytes so it shouldn’t be an issue what fs you use.

I only had to run this in my home server, behind my router which already has firewall to prevent outside traffic, so at least I’m a bit at ease for that.
In the VPS everything worked without having to manually modify iptables.

For some reason I wasn’t being able to make a curl call to the internet inside docker.
I thought it could be DNS, but that was working properly trying nslookup tailscale.com
The call to the same url wasn’t working at all. I don’t remember the exact details of the errors since the iptables modification fixed it.

AFAIK the only difference between the two setups was ufw enabled in the VPS, but not at home.
So I installed UFW at home and removed the rule from iptables and everything keeps working right now.

I didn’t save the output of iptables before uwf, but right now there are almost 100 rules for it.

For example since this is curl you’re probably going to connect to ports 80 and 443 so you can add --dport to restrict the ports to the OUTPUT rule. And you should specify the interface (in this case docker0) in almost all cases.

Oh, that’s a good point!
I’ll later try to replicate the issue and test this, since I don’t understand why OUTPUT should be solved by an INPUT rule.

Ah, that makes sense!
Yes, a DB would let you build this. But the point is in the word “build”, you need to think about what is needed, in which format, how to properly make all the relationships to have data consistency and flexibility, etc.
For example, you might implement the tags as a text field, then we still have the same issue about addition, removal, and reorder. One fix could be have a many tags to one task table. Then we have the problem of mistyping a tag, you might want to add TODO but you forgot you have it as todo, which might not be a problem if the field is case insensitive, but what about to-do?
So there are still a lot of stuff you might oversight which will come up to sidetrack you from creating and doing your tasks even if you abstract all of this into a script.

Specifically for todo list I selfhost https://vikunja.io/
It has OAS so you can easily generate a library for any language for you to create a CLI.
Each task has a lot of attributes, including the ones you want: relation between tasks, labels, due date, assignee.

Maybe you can have a project for your book list, but it might be overkill.

For links and articles to read I’d say a simple bookmark software could be enough, even the ones in your browser.
If you want to go a bit beyond that I’m using https://github.com/goniszewski/grimoire
I like it because it has nested categories plus tags, most other bookmark projects only have simple categories or only tags.
It also has a basic API but is enough for most use cases.
Other option could be an RSS reader if you want to get all articles from a site. I’m using https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS which has the option to retrieve data form sites using XMLPath in case they don’t offer RSS.

If you still want to go the DB route, then as others have mentioned, since it’ll be local and single user, sqlite is the best option.
I’d still encourage you to use any existing project, and if it’s open source you can easily contribute the code you’d have done for you to help improve it for the next person with your exact needs.

(Just paid attention to your username :P
I also love matcha, not an addict tho haha)

I can’t imagine this flow working with any DB without an UI to manage it.
How are you going to store all that in an easy yet flexible way to handle all with SQL?

A table for notes?
What fields would it have? Probably just a text field.
Creating it is simple: insert “initial note”… How are you going to update it? A simple update to the ID won’t work since you’ll be replacing all the content, you’d need to query the note, copy it to a text editor and then copy it back to a query (don’t forget to escape it).
Then probably you want to know which is your oldest note, so you need to include created_at and updated_at fields.
Maybe a title per note is a nice addition, so a new field to add title.

What about the todo lists? Will they be stored in the same notes table?
If so, then the same problem, how are you going to update them? Include new items, mark items as done, remove them, reorder them.
Maybe a dedicated table, well, two tables, list metadata and list items.
In metadata almost the same fields as notes, but description instead of text. The list items will have status and text.

Maybe you can reuse the todo tables for your book list and links/articles to read.

so that I can script its commands to create simpler abstractions, rather than writing out the full queries every time.

This already exists, several note taking apps which wrap around either the filesystem or a DB so you only have to worry about writing your ideas into them.
I’d suggest to not reinvent the wheel unless nothing satisfies you.

What are the pros of using a DB directly for your use case?
What are the cons of using a note taking app which will provide a text editor?

If you really really want to use a DB maybe look into https://github.com/zadam/trilium
It uses sqlite to store the notes, so maybe you can check the code and get an idea if it’s complicated or not for you to manually replicate all of that.
If not, I’d also recommend obsidian, it stores the notes in md files, so you can open them with any software you want and they’ll have a standard syntax.

I was juggling like that, I had most of my files in NTFS so I could read them in windows, even for files read only by Linux programs.
Most programs were able to read from any part of the file system, but for those with strict paths I used symlinks.

But I haven’t had any use for Windows lately so I decided to delete all but one NTFS partition and this last one is only 256GB with 100GB free.
The rest of the data I moved it to ext4 and btrf partitions.

Found that also myself trying to do the same thing haha. I did the same process as OP, gparted took 2.5 hours in my 1TB HDD to create a new partition, then copying the data from old to new partition was painfully slow, so I went to copy it to another dive and into the new partition.
Afterwards I deleted the old partition and grew the new one, which took a bit more than 1.5 hours.

If I had the space I would have copied all the data out of the drive, formatted it and then copied back into. It would have been quicker.

Yesterday I started looking for mini pcs and found this post https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1afzkt5/2024_general_mini_pc_guide_usa/

They shared this link which contains data on 2.8k machines, it helped me compare some of the options I was looking for and find new ones.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SWqLJ6tGmYHzqGaa4RZs54iw7C1uLcTU_rLTRHTOzaA/edit

Sadly it doesn’t contain data bout the ThinkPad, but I might as well share in case you’re willing to consider other brands.

Edit: Oh, wait, I was thinking about a ThinkCentre, not a ThinkPad :P
Well, I’ll leave this around in case someone finds it useful, hehe.