Should be fine, just don’t cheap out on the external drive / cable you will be using. And when you’re using something like smartctl you’ll know right away if SMART info is passing through your USB for proper testing.

I’ve done a lot of these type of scans via USB drives, honestly the more annoying part is that some USB drives do wonky things like go into sleep mode within 1-5 minutes which will disrupt any sort of scanning you had going. So with USB drive scanning I usually implement something to keep the drive alive and awake e.g. a simple infinite loop script to write a file every x seconds, or if you’re on windows you can also use KeepAliveHD.

is there anything you would recommend?

You’d need to donate via whatever means they accept donations, it’s not something you get to choose yourself. Unless you meant that you are going to keep contacting FOSS projects to ask them to set up new donation methods?

Personally I donate via crypto or other means that they allow donations via credit card (Liberapay / Ko-Fi work well IMO) . No Paypal/Venmo since I can’t use those services - some FOSS projects I don’t donate at all if they only accept Paypal.

however I can still seed the torrent how is that possible?

Yes you can still seed as well as download. But you are limited and can only upload and download torrent data in swarms that contain peers that are themselves fully connectable (port forwarded).

So say you join a torrent swarm that only contains peers just like you (firewalled, no ports forwarded) then no one will transfer any torrent data with each other. Everyone is stuck waiting for a fully connectable (port forwarded) peer to join that swarm.

I tried creating my own torrent and was able to dl it on another device, but on her machine it stayed at 0% and wouldn’t let me connect to seed

At least one of the torrent clients needs to be fully connectable (port forwarded) for torrents to transfer data. You need to test that e.g. test your torrent client’s incoming connection port with a port test website like https://www.canyouseeme.org, https://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports, etc. & make sure those port test websites can successfully test connect to your torrent client’s incoming connection port. If the test fails then you need to look at opening the port via your OS firewall and/or router firewall.

Is FTP a good option? I set up a proxmox server last night but I don’t really know what I’m doing yet

Probably best to avoid FTP if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s not all that secure… you’d want to at least configure SFTP or FTPS which is just going to be more complicated vs fixing your torrent issues. And technically you still need to make those connectable (port forwarded) too, just like your torrent client.

All that aside it’s probably easier to use Syncthing if you can’t get the torrent working.

You could also try one of those file transfer websites that use WebRTC to transfer data peer to peer e.g. https://file.pizza or similar. Not sure how well they work for huge amounts of data but their github page mentions that Firefox is better for that, apparently Chrome starts to choke with data 500+ MB.

So to make it clear: people are allowed to make new piracy centric communities with the express rule to not post direct links to primarily providing copyright infringing material?

Nope, it’s more than that. Lemmy.world admins don’t want you to link to any websites that link to anything that might contain direct links or references to direct links. Strangely that means that linking to Google or Reddit would fail that test so links to those sites should be removed by lemmy.world admins too.

Per admin’s own post they removed !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

This community, however, contains a pinned Megathread post by a community moderator, which, through a few levels of a pastebin-like site, provides an aggregated overview of various sources of content. Some of these sources are entirely legal content, but it intentionally includes various other references, such as the website referred to from the CrackWatch community, which are primarily intended for copyright infringement.

The megathread post that admins are referring to contains links to a different website that contains links - that website is not on Lemmy at all. Lemmy.world admins took this removal action because the community contains a link to another site that may contain links lemmy.world admins don’t like.

Automation apps have gotten more popular over the years so yes, they are still a thing.

Sonarr/Radarr are the most popular ones but there are others too. Most work with torrents and usenet but you’d need to check the individual projects to be sure.