Why is it that whenever I think of a new fun project to do, I end up in a spiral maze of "Why has nobody thought about and then written up this $glaring_problem" ?
No promises, I just figure maybe my googlebubble is different from yours and that was something I found :D Good luck either way - satisfying users is always a balancing act.
Oftentimes, though it's less useful for you if everyone actually did as asked in the style you used, simply forcing people to rank stuff in order of importance / preference / desire rather than giving free choice per item can help a lot.
I run an HP Microserver as a nas and similar service mix to what you describe. I found that trying to skimp on "power" just meant I had to upsize over and over. The microserver has been fantastic for ages, just added more disk to it recently though.
Fair enough. Then yes compression would help, though I'd probably have done it as "mysqldump | gzip -c | ssh blahfoo ..." assuming you're just making a backup, not then restoring it on the target host.