Awhile back I wrote about my experience in running TrueNAS and Nextcloud server at home. Thought I would give a small update how is that after 1.5 years.
I’m still very happy with the whole setup, even extended storage in the server. Had some interesting experiences when I tried to upgrade Plex and Nextcloud jails. There I just gave up, I still update and upgrade them, but not via TrueNAS’ update functionality, but by logging into the instance and issuing the update commands in the container. Also before updating I always make backups of them using the snapshot feature and when I managed to fubar my Nextcloud instance it was just ~4 clicks to restore it to normal without losing data or settings or anything. It is quite fiddly, still didn’t manage to figure out how am I going to upgrade the MySQL in that container. Tried to just use the system’s package manager, but that didn’t turn out well.. So might gonna re-create a new instance and just migrate settings and mounts over.
Managed to discover a plugin for Nextcloud recently that manages RSS feeds and has also an Android app, so that it can keep track of read and unread news no matter where the reading happened. Pretty much like feedly (used that service before finding this), so I can read some articles on the computer and those will be also marked as read on the mobile. Writing it down it feels like a laughable feature, but its really convenient! (one less google owned service that I use)
My only grievance with Nextcloud is a regression in their mobile app that they are really slow on fixing it. The issue is about that once you sync photos from Nextcloud to your phone, then the mobile’s gallery app won’t see them properly, so you cannot use those photos in other apps. E.g. would like to crop and only send the cropped image to someone on discord, well then you’re out of luck.. have to edit it on the computer.. and since I’m on the computer, might as well send it from there.. Not a deal breaker bug, but it is annoying. Like this Nextcloud for my wife is only about backup and easy access on the computer.
Over to backup feature of TrueNAS. Those files that are important to me and they are not in Nextcloud (e.g. full family photo collection) I setup TrueNAS to do daily cloud backups. I’m using Backblaze for it and like this I have an offsite backup for ~7 USD/month for all those files that are truly important. Also TrueNAS can do encrypted backups, so if the worst would happen and Backblaze would get hacked, then still nobody would have to see pictures of me sipping beer in my underwear. :D
So in this post I have mentioned:
Safe to say that I’m very happy with this setup and that I’ve managed to repurposed an old PC that wouldn’t really get otherwise any use.