AirVPN has port forwarding. Don't use proton vpn, the forwarding does not work for that.
Of course, it's just a http server. All you have to do is port-forward.
If they're well named files, just spin up a webDAV server via rclone
and search by file name in the browser. You could also use davfs2
to mount the server locally in a directory and then filter through the content with fd | fzf
If they're text files, spin up a docker with Forgejo (formerly gitea) and enable the bleve search indexer.
If you wanted to get really fancy, you could have wikijs in the same docker container, use git as a backend and get a wiki that's easy to fork and distribute among the team.
I recently moved a lot of my services off my daily driver onto what will become a NAS.
I settled on Void because it has such good support for ZFS. If you're going to use ZFS, I would recommend Void.
Arch can be a bit unstable but it's simple to work with so that's an option.
If you run things in docker containers it shouldn't matter anyway, so ultimately pick something you're likely to use outside your media box, that way you'll be able to maintain it better.
As for remote access, I have a separate machine running alpine with wireguard in a docker container, I VPN into that machine to get access to other devices in the network.
I would love one of you're still offering