Yusuf

One resource check worth doing before any of this: confirm the pool actually has free space and the dataset has no quota you forgot about.

An app that cannot write because the quota is reached fails at startup in exactly the same silent way as one that cannot write because of permissions, and it is a five-second thing to rule out.

Do the password vault first, not last.

Everything else on that list you can rebuild slowly with the service down. A vault you cannot open is a bad afternoon, and its export is small and takes a minute. Export it to an encrypted file, verify you can open the export somewhere else, then start the migration.

Same logic for anything holding two-factor seeds.

Strong agreement on the config backup, and let me put a number on why it matters more than the wear question.

I have had a boot device fail. Total downtime was about forty minutes: install to the replacement, import the config, import the pool, done. Everything came back including shares, users and scheduled tasks.

Someone I know had the same failure with no config export. He got his data back, the pool was fine, but he rebuilt every share, every dataset permission, every user and every scheduled job from memory over a weekend, and was still finding missing pieces a month later.

Same hardware failure. The difference was one exported file.