I can’t give you specific recommendations because I don’t know much about E mount lens, but in general I would say 30mm is wide enough and your next lens should probably be in the 75-100mm range. Don’t be afraid of zoom lenses, the modern mirrorless zooms are much better than old zooms. Also the longer the lens, the more expensive 2.8 aperture will be. So don’t worry too much if you have to go up to f/4 or 4.5.

Another thing to pay attention to is minimum focus distance. It can be really fun to be able to get the lens close to an object. Consider macro lenses. Just because they say macro doesn’t mean you can’t use them for everything else, it just means it’s capable of taking pictures close up. From a quick search, it looks like there’s a Sony 90mm 2.8, Sigma 70mm or 105mm macro lenses for around $500 used. Not sure if that’s too much but I would pick something like those.

I’m only familiar with CLI tools but at least for smaller directories diff works well. Say you have a backup directory and you want to see how it differs from a source directory:

diff -rq /source/directory /backup/directory

Another trick is to use find to look for a unique file to see where, if at all, it’s backed up:

find /backup/directory -name unique-file-name.jpg

Ah, in that case you will probably need to go into the container to do the backup. I avoid mounted volumes.

As your user account, just run something like:

podman volume export VOLUME >backup.tar

Or from another machine, say you want to do a remote backup from your server:

ssh user@host podman volume export VOLUME | zstd -o backup.tar.zstd