I think the point with all of these is that they are “cloud”-based. Except instead of the cloud being someone else’s computer, it’s your own. Let’s take Immich, for example. Sure I could keep all my photos on my phone. But what if I lose or break my phone? What if I have an actual camera with an SD card and I want to offload those photos? Self-hosting lets me keep a backup. I can set up a server with redundant drives that itself backs up to a server in another location with its own separate drives. Thus, I have my own safe cloud storage.

I don’t think that’s possible if they don’t have a working boot drive.

Oh I see now. You should be able to import them. Worst case is you can’t then you’re back where you are now. There shouldn’t be any data loss.

Yeah. As far as I understand it, exporting is more of a config thing. You can shut down your system asd boot it while missing drives (done this by accident) and boot while missing, and it’ll say there’s an issue with it. Shut down, pop the drives back in and you’re good to go on boot.

You can just drop in a new boot drive and install from a usb. I do recommend setting up a boot pool mirror though. This way if one goes down, you have a spare that can be used to help recover more quickly.

They showed and talked about it in the keynote too. It’s not like this is some last minute surprise.

I can’t do timestamped links on mobile, but it’s at 6:27: https://youtu.be/TX9qSaGXFyg

"To start, we’re offering each Premium individual, as well as plan managers for Family and Duo accounts, 15 hours of listening per month—giving them the ability to enjoy as many titles as they want within that monthly allocation.

[…]

For those super audiophiles who use up their 15 hours before their monthly billing cycles refresh, you can purchase a 10-hour top-up to finish that series. Not sure how many hours you have left? Check it at any time in your in-app settings. "

No cost listed on how much the top-ups are.

You could accomplish this with Tasker if you wanted to dip your toes into some programming.