Hi Everyone,
So, I am very new to self-hosting. A couple of years ago I set up a mini PC running Ubuntu Server with Nextcloud and Jellyfin on my network. Now I think I want to move away from Nextcloud as for me, uploading files to it hasn’t been super reliable and it has been a little slow. It also seems to have a lot of features I really don’t need.
At the moment, I basically use my server just for file storage, plus running Jellyfin. I think initially I went to nextcloud because I wanted a solution that would automatically sync my files to my network storage kinda like onedrive. However, Nextcloud on different systems doesn’t work the same way and I basically ended up just manually copying everything over to Nextcloud and using it like a network drive. At that point, why even use nextcloud then? I would be better off with Sharing a folder using Samba right? Do you think that would be the best fit for my needs? Or should I learn about freenas? Taking a quick look at it I’m not sure what advantages it would have over just a samba share.
Edit: Thanks everyone! You’ve given me a lot to look into!
I’m not familiar with FreeNAS, but I see it’s advantages mostly in it’s gui and zfs support. So if you just need a few smb shares and don’t need to constantly configure it, I’d go with Ubuntu.
If you have multiple disks that you can use in raid, then zfs might be a good idea for it’s check summing capabilities and correction of bitrot.
But it’s also possible to install zfs on Ubuntu, though you’d have to use the cli instead of FreeNAS gui. I’ve recently setup a zfs raid 1 for the first time and the cli is simple to understand and the docs are great.
So I’d stay with Ubuntu and just use samba directly.