That’s very unfortunate but hopefully you developed skills that will help you in your future career.

Digital only. Who even has room for physical books.

Have autoplay disabled

Digital for sure. Who has room for physical books? The physical books that I’ve somehow gathered over the years are the worst items I have in terms of volume (or mass) relative to their utility.

Agree about Joplin. No need for a full NextCloud instance, I use the WebDAV option which Apache has pretty much out of the box.

If your email server is offline then mail won’t be delivered. The sender’s server will retry as other have noted, but how often and how many times varies. Hosting at home, even when possible, is not a great idea in my opinion.

There are endless options for hosting out there, I don’t want to name names since I only really have experience with one.

That is not my experience.

Not for everyone, but self-hosting isn’t so bad.