If you’re OK with a little more power usage (like 10W instead of 3-5W), you can buy a mini PC from Dell/Lenovo/HP with a 7th gen Intel CPU for about $50-70 on ebay, with storage and RAM included. As a bonus you also get a case, power supply, cooling, etc… which you have to buy extra for the Pi.

It’ll be significantly faster in every way, with a lot more options for expansion if needed. The Pi 3 is very slow for even the most basic tasks, even just running apt upgrade can take several minutes or more for a few package updates.

Resticprofile is also a good one, and supports windows.

This looks perfect! I’ve been waiting for something like this because I really don’t like interacting via CLI with my backups.

Going to give it a try, do you take donations? I’ll send one if I end up using it!

Proxmox has a built in backups system, and also handles LXC containers.

Also proxmox can run ZFS just like TrueNAS, so there is little reason to use TrueNAS instead of Proxmox unless you’re just wanting a pure NAS with nothing else.

Should be able to just install the package xdg-user-dirs on any distro. Would probably work fine in LXC containers too.

The simplest option is just connect via SMB, WebDAV, NFS, etc and browse using your normal file browser.

There are a ton of various web based photo galleries: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#photo-and-video-galleries

Some can be hosted on your basic Nginx+PHP+MariaDB stack which is more complex to set up, but most are going to be meant for deployment on Docker because that makes everything very easy.

They’re also useful because they’re easy to deploy, contain all the dependencies needed, portable, and isolate things breaking from affecting the host or other containers.

I assume it’s just not built to be fast, because it’s still slow even with MySQL, Redis, high PHP memory limits, a fast CPU and NVMe storage, and so on.

Last time I tested it I had a load time of 1-2 seconds just to bring up the files interface, it feels laggy no matter what. And syncing a folder with ~50k files and 40GB or so in size takes a very long time compared to Syncthing or just syncing over SMB.

Fair enough, it does add a good chunk of power usage though as HDDs are pretty power heavy at 5-7W or so.

Set up a minimal server VM instead? You don’t need to install a GUI on a VM.

Debian minimal uses very few resources, that’s what I use.

https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser might be what you want for that, just a basic web based file management tool.

But you could also just use SMB and access the shares directly from file explorer.

You end up wasting a ton of space though because each vdev has its own parity drives.

Plex/Jellyfin is automatically managed by Sonarr/Radarr so I don’t touch those.

But for game servers I use Pterodactyl which has a nice WebUI to manage the server and its files, and has automated backups.

None of them, because every manufacturer has made good and bad products. Seagate had really bad 3TB drives which gave them a lot of that reputation.

I just buy whatever fits my budget for HDDs and have proper backups in place. I think almost all of my HDDs are ‘refurbished’ ones.

For SSDs I look for one with a good TBW rating with a cache in it. Typically I’ll go for used enterprise SSDs as well.

It’s running on Debian Linux so any disk imaging tool will work it. I recommend this one: https://rescuezilla.com/

If you already have a Unifi router/firewall that’ll work fine, you don’t need this.

All of it is LAN only except Wireguard and some game servers.

For incoming traffic on IPv4 only, NAT technically is fine. But it won’t block any outgoing traffic, and IPv6 doesn’t use NAT at all.

Have you tried limiting the RAM usage of those containers? They tend to use as much as you give them, which is all of it by default.

The easiest I’ve ever used is https://localsend.org/

Very simple, just open it on both computers, select the file and click the other computer.