You definitely should still check this, but even with proper indexing settings Windows is still garbage at search and has been since XP.

And this is coming from one of the only people who ever defends MS on Lemmy.

Yep, that would work fine for the first line of defense. Eventually, you can expand it to copy, replicate, or drive swap the onprem backups offsite somewhere (e.g., cloud, office, or family member) if you want to protect your data from site loss (e.g., house fire).

The only thing missing is a good backup.

If you are storing anything important – especially Immich and Vaultwarden data – you should have a good offsite protection strategy. And even the HASS config should be backed up with versioning because rebuilding from scratch could be painful once you get deep into it.

I’ll let others chime in on possible good backup options because I use Veeam and Azure, which really isn’t in the spirit of this community, and I’d be interested in good open source options myself.

Also, RAID (mirroring) is NOT a backup.

Lol Microsoft is not even close to a walled garden. This is just them removing the password manager feature that nobody used from their authenticator app.

The easiest way that doesn’t affect the main network would be to use a travel router. Its WAN IP would be the private IP it gets from the main network (over wireless since that’s your only option). And it would NAT your network onto that IP and then you can do whatever you want on your network.

I’m not sure if that Mikrotik router will do this but it might. You basically need something that can connect to an SSID and use that interface as its WAN interface. The wireless factor here is really limiting your choices. If you had a wired uplink to the main network you could use any router/gateway/firewall you wanted. You could also use an AP in bridge mode to connect to the main network’s SSID and wire it to the WAN port of any router of your choice.

You don’t really need to use VLANs to separate your network from the main network unless you want to share any of the same layer 2 segments (basically wired Ethernet) while keeping it isolated. But it doesn’t really sound like that applies in your scenario. Of course using VLANs within your network would still make sense if that applies (for example, to separate your server traffic from your IoT traffic).

As another poster mentioned, QubesOS with anti evil maid will work, but that’s the defense against state actors too and is overkill for this threat model.

BitLocker or any FDE using SecureBoot and PCR 7 will be sufficient for this (with Linux you also need PCRs 8+9 to protect against grub and initramfs attacks). Even if they can replace something in the boot chain with something trusted, it’ll change PCR 7 and you’d be prompted to unlock with a recovery key (don’t blindly enter it without verifying the boot chain and knowing why you’re being prompted).

With Secure Boot alone, the malicious bootloader would still need to be trusted (something like BlackLotus).

Also make sure you have a strong BIOS password and disable boot from USB, PXE, and anything else that isn’t the specific EFI bootloader used by your OS(es).