Honestly if they are not that technical, I’d with the nearly fool proof solutions of QNAP and Synology and alike. It is very easy to maintain. I think e.g. Synology still provides updates for their 2012-2013 generation devices, hardware limitations apply whatsoever.

Surely you get less Hardware/Dollar but the software is near fool proof. I recommended such devices to two of my half technical friends and granted mutual space for encrypted off-site Backups and it just works flawlessly. If they would have me setup any self made raspberry pi like solution and anything goes wrong with their data I’d rather not stand in their line of sight.

“Up-to-date” is quite unfitting for ~17-18 years :P

Most Windows Programs running with root access is like, I don’t know… Windows XP era maybe?

is the history of the values available after restart? like the graphs shown when you click a sensor entity?

recorder is enabled by default. however, when you are using docker it might be possible that the default file data base (it’s folder) is not mapped to a persistent location outside the container (resp. in the host file system).

however, I really do not know much about all this docker related stuff. my recorder suggestion was just a shot into the blue. if I would be facing this problem I might just try to set up a relational data base like MySQL or PostgreSQL as a target for the recorder.

Restoring the states depends on the recorder. What are your settings regarding the recorder?

Edit: reference https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/recorder/

I know it’s different, but if I wouldn’t know home assistant I could have assumed it had something to do with USB