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!
A lot of those points are more or less unrelated.
You can set up a samba share with a bare metal ubuntu/fedora/gentoo/whatever machine. Similarly, you can run nextcloud on whatever (I like the containerized version but…). And you can (probably) do both on a freenas box.
As for my personal setup: most of my NAS I just access via smb or scp/rsync. But for stuff that I do need synchronized, I use nextcloud… with said smb share('s directory) mounted into the container. It is far from the most secure approach (seriously, how the hell is nextcloud a commercial product when it is so feature bare and prone to breaking in containers!!!), but these are files where the goal is mostly convenience (game saves, etc) rather than privacy.