TrueNAS might not be for you, if you are home user.

[winnielinnie]

I can't wait for the second book to be published! Is this still going to be released as a three-volume series?

Wait... what website am I on again?

 

[Davvo]

Wait... what website am I on again?

JunctionTemp.iX

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

A potato... I pull it together and the waitress takes my order for a proper steak and fries, and over dinner or lunch or whatever you'd call it I mention "Elaine" is a pretty name and it seems to fit her. She snorts.

"I hate the name my middle name is Elizabeth. When I was in grade school I had curly hair and the kids called me 'frizzy Lizzy' and I didn't like that so much either." I just about fell over I was laughing so hard...when I could breathe again I said, "You snort?" (I guess it was a question.) We looked deep into each other's eyes for a moment and burst out laughing at the same time. From there conversations somehow became much easier, dinner was great, we decided to walk along the lakefront, and that's how all the server alerts got missed over the weekend. (The systems are all back up and fine, by the way.)

Lizzy was supposed to fly out Sunday afternoon but her flight got messed up so she flew out Monday morning. What a banger of a weekend. (and i'm still tired)

 

[indivision]

Long time TrueNAS user.

I think it's great for home users. There is a bar of technical know-how needed to maintain it. But, that is true for even the most home-focused system. You still need to know how to set up static IP in a router, etc. The idea that any NAS is going to run trouble-free without needing maintenance is a myth.

Most of my bug reports over the years have gone well. But, my last one was surprising and disappointing. I basically just got the palm in face. Maybe this is a new thing due to new staff?

 

[danb35]

Aw, there you go interrupting story time and getting us back on topic. But you're right. I've been using the product formerly known as the product formerly known as FreeNAS, then FreeNAS, then TrueNAS CORE, and now TrueNAS SCALE at home for 12-13 years. I'm not an IT pro of any sort; I'm a lawyer. But it's worked well, and it hasn't lost me a byte of data. All my griping about iX aside--and there's been a lot of it, and I believe it's been at least mostly justified--it's been a solid file-storage platform.

Handling of bug reports, though, has been very much a mixed bag.

 

[Davvo]

I'm not an IT pro of any sort; I'm a lawyer.

Would have never guessed.

Handling of bug reports, though, has been very much a mixed bag.

I don't have much experience, but I do feel the current system is a bit intricate and detached.

 

[danb35]

Would have never guessed.

I'm not sure if that was serious or facetious--so well played.

 

[Ericloewe]

...and this is something that's been broken for many (over ten) years, with many complaints.

It was actually pretty decent for a short time in the then-new-now-current GUI, but was soon broken.

Wait... what website am I on again?

As a moderator I feel the need to intervene, but I am so confused I don't really know my options, much less the way forward. Uhh... keep it professional?

 

[IndieCoopz]

Well i switched from Core to Scale since a few days because of the upcoming dropping app support in Core and i must say that the improvements that scale has made over the last years are great. I remember the first scale releases and sorry - they werent usable.^^
The access to samba and app directories at the same time is possible by setting an option in settings but yes, maybe iX should have set the option to off by default... What i miss since years, is the option to kill running tasks in the top bar task manager, but who knows, maybe it will be implemented one day. This and other design choices are hard to understand, i understand the points you mention, but overall its a well usable storage OS. Im a IT technican so my knowledge and experience may differ from people who are not IT but i dont think that these are the target customers. Without IT knownledge its impossible to configure TN well.

 

[kiriak]

Another home user here with no professional or academic IT background.

For me TrueNAS is the absolute solution a home user can have regarding data integrity. For a (big) enterpise maybe there are other solutions too, I don't know. But I believe for a home user or small business TrueNAS is the ultimate way for reliable data storage (of course some hardware requirements have to be followed and backups are always necessary).

Synology is easier usually (but not in every case even for home use), it is almost plug and play, especially if it's apps fit one's needs.
But even in this case one needs to spend time with it to setup it correctly and maintain it.
When I moved to TN I discovered that a few files were missing from my Synology backups due to a restriction in file name length in encrypted format. These files were silently omitted from the backups. Luckily I didn't need these backups.

I need a few apps like Unifi, Syncthing, a photo app and maybe Nextcloud and HomeAssistant. There was no photo app in Core and I had a bad experience with Nextcloud upgrades in Core. I tried Scale with little success.
Never mind. The easy solution for me was to buy an old and very cheap mini PC for all the apps I need on Docker under OMV and use my TrueNAS Core machine just for data storage. The TN is now ON a few days each week and the electricity savings will pay off the mini PC in just 1-2 years.
But my feeling is that even if I use TrueNAS just for data storage I will need to move to Scale sooner or later.

Many thanks to IxSystems for giving us home users the opportunity to use this superb piece of software for our precious data.

 

[Protopia]

I am a Truenas (and Truenas Scale) home user newbie, and I have successfully built and gone live with my (Terramaster F5-221) Truenas Scale server, and having migrated the bulk of my data over, I am working towards getting all the odds and ends with special requirements migrated. Whilst I would readily admit that I am not the most knowledgeable person about Truenas, I am a highly experienced IT professional and have contributed a lot to various open source projects over the years - and I have successfully created and run on-IT businesses. So I have been around, I understand development, systems integration, commercial reality and the ups and downs of open-source projects.

To all the whiners and gripers who have posted here, I would say the following:

1. There is nothing stopping you from building a NAS using Debian Linux (or some other distribution), ZFS, Samba, Kubernetes etc. You would pretty much get all the same server functionality but without the nice GUI and with having to put a lot of effort into installation, integration and configuration before you had a working system. Just imagine what technical skills you might need, how much research you would need to do and how steep the learning curve mighty be etc.

2. What you get as a non-Enterprise, non paying user is that you can:

• Download, install and use Truenas FOR FREE
• Have an integrated system that has the base configuration of the component parts already done, and the vast majority of bugs and integration issues already ironed out FOR FREE
• Get a WebUI that makes it much, much, much easier to set the whole thing up FOR FREE
• Get support from both the community and to a considerable extent from ixSystems FOR FREE

So, you have a choice, but since you are here, it is pretty much a given that you have already chosen option 2.

IME (based on several open-source projects lead by commercial organisations) ixSystems are also incredibly open to feedback, bug reports etc. from home users - believe me, we could be much much much worse off.

So if you are going to post here about issues with TrueNAS, please do so in the context of all the benefits you get before whining and whinging about how ixSystems are not supporting home users. ixSystems has salaries and bills to pay, and focusing primarily on their paying customers is what allows them to thrive and be able to provide all the stuff FOR FREE for the rest of us.

If anyone from ixSystem is reading this, personally I am grateful as heck, and I thank you for making this great software available to me FOR FREE.

The topic of this thread is "TrueNAS might not be for you if you are home user", but in summary my position is the absolute opposite: If you ARE a home user, TrueNAS may be the best choice you ever made.

 

[morganL]

I am a Truenas (and Truenas Scale) home user newbie, and I have successfully built and gone live with my (Terramaster F5-221) Truenas Scale server, and having migrated the bulk of my data over, I am working towards getting all the odds and ends with special requirements migrated. Whilst I would readily admit that I am not the most knowledgeable person about Truenas, I am a highly experienced IT professional and have contributed a lot to various open source projects over the years - and I have successfully created and run on-IT businesses. So I have been around, I understand development, systems integration, commercial reality and the ups and downs of open-source projects.

To all the whiners and gripers who have posted here, I would say the following:

1. There is nothing stopping you from building a NAS using Debian Linux (or some other distribution), ZFS, Samba, Kubernetes etc. You would pretty much get all the same server functionality but without the nice GUI and with having to put a lot of effort into installation, integration and configuration before you had a working system. Just imagine what technical skills you might need, how much research you would need to do and how steep the learning curve mighty be etc.

2. What you get as a non-Enterprise, non paying user is that you can:

• Download, install and use Truenas FOR FREE
• Have an integrated system that has the base configuration of the component parts already done, and the vast majority of bugs and integration issues already ironed out FOR FREE
• Get a WebUI that makes it much, much, much easier to set the whole thing up FOR FREE
• Get support from both the community and to a considerable extent from ixSystems FOR FREE

So, you have a choice, but since you are here, it is pretty much a given that you have already chosen option 2.

IME (based on several open-source projects lead by commercial organisations) ixSystems are also incredibly open to feedback, bug reports etc. from home users - believe me, we could be much much much worse off.

So if you are going to post here about issues with TrueNAS, please do so in the context of all the benefits you get before whining and whinging about how ixSystems are not supporting home users. ixSystems has salaries and bills to pay, and focusing primarily on their paying customers is what allows them to thrive and be able to provide all the stuff FOR FREE for the rest of us.

If anyone from ixSystem is reading this, personally I am grateful as heck, and I thank you for making this great software available to me FOR FREE.

The topic of this thread is "TrueNAS might not be for you if you are home user", but in summary my position is the absolute opposite: If you ARE a home user, TrueNAS may be the best choice you ever made.

I missed this post earlier, but very much appreciate the feedback. You've captured our intentions very well.

While you make think its completely FREE, whenever you find a bug or post some good advice on the forums, you have also done that FOR FREE and iX benefits from that. The quality in our Enterprise products would not be so good without 100,000 active testers, both CORE and SCALE.

If anyone has the opportunity to recommend iX to organizations that need a fully supported system, we very much appreciate those FREE referrals. Our business survives and grows on these. Thanks again.

 

[Jamberry]

I love TrueNAS and how it is currently structured. I still use CORE, because I personally don't believe in all-in-one systems. I tried this summer to create an all-in-one system, but after wasting days of trying to virtualize OPNsense with vNIC on Proxmox I gave up. There are just so many hoops you have to jump through and so much added complexity or simply performance drawbacks, it is just not worth it. Sure, you get away with a virtual OPNsense and 1GBit, but with 10GBit it gets a lot more difficult.

So what I am trying to say, each of these things has its own pros and cons. A RangeRover will do great off-road, but not on the race track, and for a Porsche 911, it is the other way around. SCALE is like a Honda Accord, a good overall car, but not great at anything.
That is why I personally run 3 machines, mini ITX OPNsense with SFP+ NICs, TrueNAS CORE with plain old HDDs as a rock solid NFS host, and Proxmox with two blazing fast NVME SSDs so every VM runs extremely fast and if it needs more storage, it can access it by NFS.

I think that most users who are unhappy with TrueNAS simply don't have the right use case for it and would be way better off with something like Unraid. Just the way HDD standby works should be a huge no-go for 90% of home users and push them towards Unraid. I think YouTubers like LawrenceSystems, Level1tech, and LinusTechTips have drawn in a lot of people with wrong exceptions who will not be happy with TrueNAS. LTT even lost data in their "professional environment", because they did not set up mail alerts, did never check the scrubs, and then lost 3 drives in a RAIDZ2... TrueNAS is not (yet) plus and play or fire and forget.

I am not reluctant to switch to SCALE in the future, but right now I am very happy with how things are and how iXSystems does development. Keep up the great direction and work!

 

[Protopia]

@Jamberry You are not comparing like with like here.

You cannot compare Truenas Scale as an all-in-one with Truenas Core stand-alone. You need to compare Truenas Scale as stand-alone with Truenas Core standalone, or compare both as all-in-one.

The reality is that Truenas Scale is the future - whether it is mature enough to replace Truenas Core is something that can be debated. That said, Truenas Scale is now on its third major release and has a lot of Charts available either from ixSystems or from TrueCharts - but IMO the formal documentation for implementing these charts is piss-poor (and even that is being kind) and the community descriptions of what to configure are just not as mature for Scale Charts as they are for Core add-ons.

So, if you are a not very technical home user and you want just a NAS and are starting with a new install, my personal opinion is that you would be much better off starting with Scale than with Core. If you need add-ons and are technical and prepared to experiment and learn how to configure Charts, then go for Scale again. But if you want add-ons and are less technical, stick with Core.

 

[Jamberry]

You cannot compare Truenas Scale as an all-in-one with Truenas Core stand-alone. You need to compare Truenas Scale as stand-alone with Truenas Core standalone, or compare both as all-in-one.

I think I can. At least for now. I compare TrueNAS CORE plus Proxmox for Apps on another host with TrueNAS SCALE.
I might say that this is an unfair comparison, because the first one needs two physical hosts, which will result in a higher idle power consumption.

if you are a not very technical home user and you want just a NAS and are starting with a new install, my personal opinion is that you would be much better off starting with Scale than with Core.

If you are not very technical, you are probably better off with Synology or QNAP.
Now that I think about it, looking at the Synology users I know and how many times they lost data, most of them are probably better off with Dropbox or OneDrive

 

[danb35]

Now that I think about it, looking at the Synology users I know and how many times they lost data, most of them are probably better off with Dropbox or OneDrive

...which I think points to an important fact: to handle a NAS right, and store your data safely, is going to take a certain amount of technical know-how. There are things that can be simplified, but there's some irreducible complexity involved, and when you try to simplify too much, you end up with a system that just can't do what you think it can.

 

[Protopia]

There is a world of difference between the technical knowledge/ability you need to use Truenas Core/Scale just for a NAS, and using it with Charts.

With a bit more of a guided implementation help, I think most people can implement either of these just for NAS. (The guide is to help them e.g. set up ZFS snapshots.) Of course when they need to recover a deleted file from a snapshot or replace a failed disk, they might need to go to e.g. Discord and get some community help, but I am not sure that Truenas Core/Scale is any better or worse than Synology or QNAP for usability in either normal use or error recovery.

 

[Johnny Fartpants]

The reality is that Truenas Scale is the future

Not sure I completely agree with this statement. TrueNAS is much loved because of FreeNAS (CORE) years of stability. SCALE is unlikely to change that anytime soon if at all. They are both different products for different use cases.

 

[danb35]

SCALE is unlikely to change that anytime soon if at all.

I think it's really going to depend on what iX does with CORE going forward. If they continue to actively develop it, I'd agree. If they relegate it to "maintenance mode," where there will be no new features, just occasional bug fixes and security updates--or if they just EOL it entirely--that would be a different story. And frankly, it doesn't look like they have any interest in doing the first of these possibilities.

 

[victort]

I think it's really going to depend on what iX does with CORE going forward. If they continue to actively develop it, I'd agree. If they relegate it to "maintenance mode," where there will be no new features, just occasional bug fixes and security updates--or if they just EOL it entirely--that would be a different story. And frankly, it doesn't look like they have any interest in doing the first of these possibilities.

If that happens, I do hope someone forks it and keeps maintaining it.