Samsonite Bag

Your motherboard has the required ports. A type a header and a type c header, it's probably just part picker being weird. The list is also set to private.
 
Edit: I was looking at an older rev of the motherboard 😞 (Fixed my reply)

I got EKWB Waterblocks and they work great on my 2080 Tis.
I'm using FE. Clocks seem to be better on FE. I got two, and they both match 2145Mhz OC.
 
I don't remember seeing "Warranty void if removed" sticker on 2080 Ti FE.

FE is love.
 
Buy the RTX 2080 Super FE, best value 2080 Super which will be a beast at 1440p gaming.

Prefer the looks of fe. I only get reference evga to put a block on it, as the bios tends to be a tad better. 

Are you gaming at 4k 120hz or doing some production thing?

If not the 2080 super is plenty good enough at $400 less...

Probably just go for the EVGA card with the reference PCB.

Unless you already have the ssd it would be better to simply buy larger ssd. There are 4TB ssd within a few $ of 4 x 1TB models. 
 
For backup I'd suggest investing in a good backup package. Something like Acronis True Image which allows one to automate the task and limit the amount of storage consumed by backups. 
 
You will want an hdd that is much larger than the data set to be backed up. This is to permit multiple backup generations. this is useful when recovering from issues that are not caught immediately.
 
It makes little sense to store backups on a unit that will also contain data included in the backup.

Id get the 8tb and have half backup and half mass storage.
 
I personally don't backup games as I can easily redownload them but thats up to you.
 
If your storing other stuff on it, id make sure to back that up aswell, maybe to the cloud

Backup should be easy, and there are lots of programs to do this. Don't partition the backup drive, just back it up as one big volume
 
Id get a bigger ssd, like 2tb drives if you can
 
For raid, id use storage spaces, don't use motherboard riad here. Then you can also easy add more drives later on.

More power draw, with ZERO upsides

I believe you can. I've run one display off of integrated graphics and another off of a dedicated GPU before, and it worked fine. 

too bad the 2080 ti doesn't use PCIe gen 4 so it's still PCIe gen 3 x8

define intensive? Even if you're watching a video with hardware decoding enabled, it can't even cost you a frame per second because Nvidia cards' use different parts of the GPU for that. If it's just on some static webpage then the difference is not even measurable.As long as you don't run another 3D app, it's as easy as thinking about food when going to the gym.