> There are good temperate places in the USA pacific northwest, but cost of living there was so high that there's no way I could have done it on Salt Lake City

> There are good temperate places in the USA pacific northwest, but cost of living there was so high that there's no way I could have done it on Salt Lake City based wages. Even just the higher CoL in Alaska was pretty painful. have you looked into oregon outside of portland? say about 30 to 40 min out? it's not trump country, and it's still cool and not that expensive. i would say cheaper than alaska. same for seattle/WA. for keeping your laptop up to date have you looked deeper into rsync? check out https://fedoramagazine.org/copying-large-files-with-rsync-and-some-misconceptions/ https://fedoramagazine.org/copying-large-files-with-rsync-an.... also you can consider zfs or btrfs as filesystem since they can offer block level sync. not always possible, but this can change things for you big time. good luck.