Leaderboard

Let's Talk About Immich If you've been running Immich on HexOS this year, you know it hasn't been smooth sailing exactly. We want to talk about what's happened, why it was so challenging, and how we're working to handle these situations better in the future. What Happened? Earlier this year, Immich deprecated their old storage configuration and required all users to migrate to a new structure. For users running Immich through docker-compose or other manual setups, this meant updating some configuration files and running a few commands. Annoying, but manageable. For some HexOS users, the migration was more involved. Because of how TrueNAS SCALE structures application storage, moving to the new configuration required either reinstalling Immich fresh (the simplest solution) or manually migrating existing data between datasets (a process that involved SSH access, rsync commands, and careful attention to permissions). But if you're choosing between "reinstall the app" or "follow a 15-step guide," neither option feels great when you chose HexOS specifically to avoid that kind of complexity. Why Was This So Hard? When Immich made this change, we had a choice to make. We could have built a comprehensive rsync-based migration tool using the TrueNAS API. It has those capabilities. But that would have meant dropping everything else we were working on to build what amounts to using a cannon to kill a mosquito: a massive, complex solution for what we hope won't be a regularly recurring problem with this particular app. Instead, our community stepped up in a huge way. Users like @forsaken and @G-M0N3Y-2503 created detailed guides (to move or rsync your data). These guides walked through the manual migration process to preserve existing data in Immich. They focused on helping users through the immediate problem, while we continue building the platform we need to handle situations like this properly. That platform is HexOS Local: a locally-hosted management application that will let us perform complex operations without being bottlenecked by the engineering overhead of building one-off solutions through the SCALE API every time an application throws us a curveball. This reduces the technical burden on our team and, more importantly, gives us the flexibility to automate maintenance tasks that previously would have required manual intervention or massive engineering investments. This same platform will serve the Local UI/UX feature we've committed to delivering as part of our 1.0 release. We'll be talking a lot more about HexOS Local in an upcoming blog post, but the key takeaway is this: we're building HexOS to handle whatever the open-source ecosystem throws at it, without having to choose between "drop everything and build a custom tool" or "make users SSH into their servers." What About Right Now? If you're currently running Immich on the old storage configuration and haven't migrated yet, you have options: The simple path: Reinstall Immich fresh with the new configuration. Your photos will need to be re-uploaded, but the setup is clean and straightforward. The preservation path: Follow one of the community migration guides to keep your existing data in place. These guides are more technical and require command-line access, but they work. Our recommendation depends on your situation. If you have a manageable photo library and good backups, the fresh install is probably your best bet. If you have years of photos, carefully organized albums, and user configurations you don't want to recreate, the migration guides are there for you. And if this seems to daunting, email support@hexos.com so we can schedule a time to assist you directly. Moving Forward The Immich situation showed us exactly where we need to invest engineering effort. We can't keep facing the choice between building massive one-off solutions or asking users to break out the terminal. That's not sustainable, and it's not the HexOS we're building. Immich is an incredible project. It's exactly the kind of self-hosted solution we want to make accessible to everyone. The team behind it recently released v2.0, marking their stable release with better upgrade paths going forward. We're committed to making sure that when the next complex maintenance task comes up, whether it's Immich or any other application, we have the infrastructure in place to handle it gracefully. That's the HexOS we're building. Thanks for your patience while we get there.

Hello all! We are excited to announce HexOS Local, powering the new local UI/UX for HexOS and capable of so much more. Read more about it on the Blogpost - Introducing HexOS Local

Forgive me, but I'm really confused by what you're saying, which means there is clearly a disconnect in our marketing language and understanding with customers as well and I want to get to the bottom of that. Let's try some clarification here: Buddy backup is a feature that will allow two HexOS users (customers) to backup to each other's server in an encrypted fashion. There is no reason you cannot be your own buddy with a second license (e.g. you buy a second server license and put a server at a secondary location). If someone bought two licenses during black friday under two separate accounts, each account can backup to each other just the same (and if they want to merge those two accounts, we can handle that for the user). With this sale, however, we are not allowing someone to buy a second license to transfer to another user (as it would open the door to reselling licenses which we don't support). I get that the term "buddy backup" may not clearly identify that you can be your own buddy, but we thought it would be fairly obvious that if you could backup to someone else on a separate account, you could also backup to yourself on the same account. I think we could loosen the "encryption" requirement in the case of backups between two servers owned by the same account, but that's more of a technical detail than marketing. Let me know what's still unclear or how we can do better on the language here. Sometimes we can be a little too close to the trees to see the forest, so if you can help give us a better perspective, we'll work to improve our messaging in the marketing. Thanks!

Another mid-quarter update featuring: - Install Script v2 with interactive questions during app installation to support user preferences (eg. Plex claim code) - Fangtooth Support with full TrueNAS 25.04 compatibility and automatic pool upgrades - Enhanced User Management with better visibility and access to folder permissions Read the full release notes: https://docs.hexos.com/release-notes/command-deck/2025-11-06 NOTE: This update was applied automatically. You may need to clear your cache.

OMG, I totally see the confusion now. I have edited that post and reworded it to be more clear. TrueNAS has no built-in means to do backups as part of their OS unless you consider rsync cron jobs/replication tasks as "backup". They don't facilitate the connection between servers or even setup the SSH permissions for you (you have to do all of that yourself). This is where our solution takes things a step further. We intend to make the experience much simpler. First you "friend" someone else that is a HexOS user (if you're doing the "buddy" approach). Then you will grant that user "permission" to backup to your system (and set a quota). Then they accept the request and authorize the backup in return (if you're doing that). Then we do the rest (establishing a secure VPN tunnel between systems, creating appropriate SSH users and handling the key exchange, etc.). You'll definitely be able to leverage the buddy backup system between two systems licensed under the same account. That would be silly of us to prohibit or unnecessarily complicate. I get the confusion. Buddy backup is just the marquee feature name for our backup solution between two servers. Every server needs a license. So if you and a buddy want to backup, you both have to have your own licenses under your own accounts. If you have two licenses for two systems under 1 account, you can use the same "buddy backup" system to handle that job as well. Apologies for muddying the water on my initial response. I can see how that had some folks confused, but I hope this clarifies.

Buddy backup will definitely work with two licenses under the same account. You will be your own buddy 😉

Another mid-quarter update featuring: New curated app installations Update to the qBittorrent installation Read more about it on our docsite here at Command Deck Update - November 25, 2025 NOTE: This update was applied automatically. You may need to clear your cache.

To celebrate the holidays and thank our community for their continued support, we're excited to announce our HexOS Holiday Sale, starting today! Existing customers can purchase additional licenses for just $99 each, perfect for expanding your home server setup. New customers can take advantage of our special two-pack bundle for $298, with additional licenses available at the same $99 promotional price. Single licenses remain available at $199 until our 1.0 release in Q1 2026. This holiday pricing for additional licenses and the two-pack bundle is available through December 31st, so don't miss out on this opportunity to join or expand your HexOS experience. Please note: License transfers are not permitted. All licenses are tied to the purchasing account. Buy now from the HexOS Store!

It's hard to believe it's already been a year since we launched the HexOS Beta and the early access campaign. What a journey it's been! In today's blog post, we're going to provide a summary of this past year's accomplishments, a run-down of what's left to achieve our 1.0 release, what's coming next, an update on the AnyRaid project, and our HexOS Holiday Sale! Read all about it in our latest blog post: https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2025-11-26.html

As of today, yes, you can access your server from anywhere using deck.hexos.com. I have a discussion planned with the team to allow you to disable remote access which would be as simple as us verifying the WAN IP of the client device being used to connect to the deck and making sure it matches the server's WAN IP. When HexOS Local arrives, you will be able to even further reduce your cloud dependency, but there are some features like installing apps/VMs, configuring buddy backups, and e-mail notifications that will require a connection to our deck. Thankfully that connection is outbound from your server, which doesn't require you to open any ports on your firewall and expose the system to the wider net. We also do have plans to implement oAuth and 2FA in the future to further enhance security and options.

We know about this problem all-too-well. The VM features will come in layers, but our plan is to try and get ahead of those kinds of problems by detecting hardware changes and automatically adjusting device ID mappings to your VMs before they start. This still needs a lot of R&D work and there are lots of potential gotchas, but I bet we can address a lot of common scenarios like what you've described. It gets more tricky when you have multiple GPUs in a system of the same make/model, as it's hard to know which one is which for assignment to VMs. I'd say that's a problem for after the initial VMs feature release for us to investigate further. Ultimately there will be some limits to what we can do, but we're going to do this as best as is humanly possible.

Def not cloud only. If your isp/network supports peer to peer, we can coordinate that and then get out of the way. That is what's included in a lifetime license. If we end up having to relay traffic for some users, that will require a subscription as we will have to pay for the relay traffic, but obviously it will still be encrypted.

Hey, Buddy Backup isn't currently available and Hexos doesn't offer anything to do a backup to another machine. However if you login to Truenas go to Data Protection and there to the Replication Tasks. You can setup a new Replication task there following this guide: https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/25.04/scaletutorials/dataprotection/replication/ But this requires that you can connect to the other server, via tunnel or domain name or sth. Similar.

Just got off a call with a few of the Eshtek guys, they set me straight very quickly. Before I called them, I dove into what others here have done. Here is what fixed the router swap for me: Sign into the TrueNas Scale Web UI. Go to Network: Go to Global Config settings: Change Nameserver1 and IPv4 Default Gateway to the IP address on/of your router. My issue was that I kept changing the NAS IP address to the IP of the NAS, not the router. Essentially, I was signed into my router interface, looked up what the NAS IP address was, and kept changing the Nameserver1 and Default gateway to that IP, when I should have been setting it to the IP of the router. Once that is done, my NAS found the internet again, the HexOS deck found a server and I was set! I had to skip the initial setup in order to prevent wiping the drives, but I was saved. Thanks to Nick and Eric!

Thanks for confirming and apologies to anyone that was confused. If anyone bought another license at $199 on accident today, send an email to support@hexos.com and we'll get the difference refunded.

No its not over. We are investigating why the correct pricing isn't showing up for users. Stand by.

The backup stuff sounds great, any serious system should have the ability to backup and restore, especially when apps like Immich are being recommended, seeing away to back all this stuff up would make HexOS a serious contender in the networking and diy nas space, maybe even business

at this time your best option would be using the in app backup and restore functions and then reinstalling it if you would like to migrate. But i will be sure to let the team know that users are interested in migrating over to curated versions of the apps.

I would like to see first party support for placing any app behind some of the most popular VPNs (PIA, Nord, Express, Proton, Tailscale, etc), as well as custom VPNs (WireGuard, OpenVPN, etc). For example, you may install “The Lounge” IRC client and have all internet communication pass through a PIA VPN so that your home IP is not exposed while chatting. Traditional methods of doing this involve painful configuration of iptables or other firewall rules. I believe this is an area where HexOS could really simplify things: Install a VPN plugin, authenticate with it, and then simply assign an app to a VPN plugin via the app’s settings if desired. It would be fully accessible from the home network without going through the VPN, but all internet traffic would go through the VPN with a kill switch in case the VPN goes down. Thoughts?

Wait, so if I have two licenses under my account I can't put my second server at eg my parents home for a offsite backup and sync via BuddyBackup?

Correct. The additional licenses is for users that want to setup multiple systems of their own, not for buddy backups. @Todd Miller rightly called this out as confusing. What I meant to say is that you just can't transfer the license to another user. You can use buddy backups (as a feature) between two systems that you own and control (licensed under one account). Sorry for the confusion! Carry on!

If there are still a plethora of users affected after Local is released, we would consider it. But if not, we would rather spend the time via support helping people up over this fence than engineer an entire solution for a handful of folks. Support@hexos.com is available to you at no cost.

That thought did occur to us, but to be perfectly honest we'd rather anyone not comfortable following the guides or having difficulty to just contact us directly for support. That's what you all paid for and we are gonna provide it. I don't want to start asking our users who aren't comfortable to navigate the TN interface.

I ended up having to reinstall Immich (twice, for some reason, the second seems less likely to be hexos related), so I appreciate you being up-front with acknowledging that it was… not fun. Daunting was probably the right word for it. I usually consider myself tech savvy so being so totally out of my depth was frustrating in a way I’m not used to. A suggestion: some folks might be having trouble completely uninstalling/reinstalling (I did) so a simple guide on how to do that might be helpful, even if it’s just “hey delete this dataset” - I’m sure the advice exists in the forum but there are a lot of things to search through to find it. If I remember right, uninstalling/reinstalling on the hexos deck didn’t fix the underlying issue or delete the underlying data. I’ve seen the pace of updates and the pace of communication improve over the last few months - which makes it easier to assume best intent. I look forward to what’s coming next (and hopefully no other apps break that bad)

Hey I just finished my hardware migration and I'm happy to report it was successful. These are the steps I did: Log into TrueNAS SCALE web interface Go to System > General Settings > Manage Configuration > Download File If you have encrypted datasets, go to Datasets > select your encrypted dataset > Export Key Shut down server and swap hardware Prepare HexOS installation drive and use it to boot Set up HexOS/TrueNAS SCALE, I left everything on default In your router settings, give the new hardware the same IP as your old one. Restart your TrueNAS server to grab the right IP. Go into TrueNAS SCALE web interface, log in Upgrade your version of TrueNAS. At the time of writing this post, the HexOS installation image is behind of what's was being supported/recommend by the HexOS web interface. Check the filename of the .tar that was created when you exported the configuration. It should have the version of TrueNAS that was used in it (i.e. 25.04.2.6). Select the same version from the upgrade screen and confirm that you want to switch upgrade train. Apply pending updates and the system will reboot. Go to Storage > Import Pool > find your zpool Got an error? Check step 9 again. Make sure you are using the same version of TrueNAS as your old boot drive. Go into System > General Settings > Manage Configuration > Upload File After reboot, go to Apps > Configuration > Unset Pool Restart TrueNAS Go back into the web interface, go to Apps > Configuration > Choose Pool Your apps should show back up and you should be able to start them. Go to the HexOS web interface. If you haven't already, unclaim your old server and claim the new one The hardware check screen should give you a warning about an existing pool. This is good, go onto the next screen and skip creating pool. Give your server a name and you should be good to go! Really hope that HexOS has an easily migration process in the future. I have learned so much about TrueNAS that it's making less sense for me to use HexOS.

Hey, No this has been fixed months ago, with the Q1 update I believe.

Just sharing some good news — my update went smoothly, and all apps, VMs, and backups are running normally under Fangtooth.

Unfortunately there are 2 version numbers for the apps in the truenas app catalog. The "version" which is what you see in hexos, this is just the iteration of the truenas docker app which has nothing to do with the overall application which is also called "app version" you can see both of these numbers in the truenas interface if you would like but here is a screen shot My "version" is 1.10.12 but that is the same thing as "app version" 2.2.3 so we are not actually behind. i totally get the confusion though and ill be sure to bring it up with the team. Just to clarify a few things Truecharts is a third party app store that afaik shut down and was never compatible with hexos All the apps you see come from the Truenas apps market which i believe is first party to truenas HexOS unfortunately does not have any control over app versions (as much as i wish we did for troubleshooting), this is all truenas

Yup it was added last night! Check the original post for instructions.

Thanks for reporting these issues. We are taking this feedback to heart and will work to address.

We now have one: Custom Install Scripts - HexOS Hub

Right side but the toggles should closer to the words like they are on the Left version. half the width of a monitor is too far away

This is now showing correctly for me. Thank you!

@wvienna @FangerZero can you guys check again and let me know if the discount shows up correctly for you now?

Yes it should still be accessible.

Most apps seperate config and user data. I'd guess the reason for this would be, people primarily care about the user data (Photos). So the config data like user profiles/Album organisation are less important. The idea being, maybe immich turns into a dumpster fire and you want to use something else, at which point you only care about the photos. So that app data, or config data as I called it are historically different, so additional work may be necessary.

1 system/installation requires 1 license. And Buddy Backup is between 2 systems requiring a license each. The owner doesn't matter all you need to have is 2 Hexos installations/servers therefor 2 licence in total and you are good to go for buddy backup.

Hmm. It sure seems it took a long time to come to this. And along the way many have already rejected this uninstall/reinstall approach assuming you would eventually have to fix this. Since this is a situation that we are most likely to encounter again do you have a plan to get the Eshtek response out before the forums are reduced to a dozen large arguments? You may not know what issues are coming but you do know months of silence has proven o be a bad situation.

I also had the same error and can confirm I am updated to 25.04 Fangtooth from TrueNAS: Might be a good idea to add a panel like this to the deck to confirm the version number, or if there is already one I cannot seem to find it.

For the issue with immich right now, the guide is the best option. We are planning for a more elaborate way of addressing app issues like this that will put less burden on the user, but we have to build our own local app for that first.

hexos will not show the drives as used as support for special vdev in the hexos interface was never added. once a special vdev is added to a pool, their use is automatic. You don't have to worry about hexos seeing or not seeing it correctly.

I haven't used Nextcloud or Opencloud but I imagine their file management solutions are similar to Google Drive. Paperless-NGX is like the "more advanced organization" option compared to Google Drive from my point of view. Paperless allows you to ingest documents through a variety of means (upload button, watched folder, reading emails and automatically saving attachments or the email based on rules). Then it tries to apply machine learning to extract the document date and other info like who the document is regarding, what kind of document it is, where it should be stored, all based on what you have manually added metadata for. If I have a receipts document type, it will learn what I consider a receipt and assign that automatically. It also OCRs all the documents and stores the text so it's searchable later. You can add custom metadata fields like a global document ID (I'm told). You can then search, view, organize, share these documents in the paperless web UI. You can customize how it stores all these documents on disk so you can still access them outside of Paperless if you want. There are a few apps that allow direct "scan to paperless" functionality with decent cropping. You don't scan documents so each page is a file. You ingest a PDF with multiple pages normally so you would scan with your phone or a scanner, then import to paperless. Though you can ingest images and other stuff.

Could we get a forum section for install scripts? That way as a community we can post a thread for a specific app and people can share their scripts and ask for feedback? I think that'd be handy, but I don't think it needs to go in the normal Applications support forum because that might confuse people as it's definitely a more advanced thing at the moment! Thanks

I am not seeing 2FA/MFA, despite it being discussed as part of the Q1 release plan. Is there a way to enable this that I am missing?

I believe integrating Home Assistant with HexOS could be a game-changer for the operating system, offering functionality that is sorely lacking in almost all other OS platforms today. A Home Assistant integration would allow users to monitor and manage their NAS more effectively. Imagine being able to track critical metrics such as system uptime, array health, disk health checks, and the overall status of your storage systems — all from within Home Assistant. Furthermore, adding control features would significantly enhance the user experience. It would be fantastic if users could automate tasks like rebooting or stopping/starting applications, VMs, or containers directly through Home Assistant. Additionally, automating disk spin-downs during off-peak hours for power savings would be a powerful and eco-friendly feature. The potential of Home Assistant integration is vast, and it's difficult to fully capture all the possibilities in a single topic. However, the core idea is simple: having such an integration, with continuous updates and new features, would be a major advantage for HexOS. While most other operating systems either lack similar functionality or offer only basic, limited capabilities, HexOS could stand out by providing a more comprehensive, user-friendly, and flexible solution.

In case there is any confusion still on this topic, a local UI is coming...100%. We actually have already begun work (we have a docker container with the UI running at this point, but it's not fully functional yet).

@Dylan Thank you for your help! It really helped me get a better understanding of the bigger picture in regards to all this, and it helped me kinda jerryrig my own solution to it. Thing is, shortly after installing the OS I had also decided to update truenas scale, which I found out later that it isn't recommended to do so. It didn't break anything for me at least, so I just figured it's all good. But after having wrestled with the guides you sent me, and stumbling upon a random reddit thread, I ended up finding out that the issue causing this whole mess was that I had basically done a "default installation" of pretty much everything in Handbrake when doing it via truenas scale. So part of what the latest version of electric eel (truenas) did, was change how the apps are handled - and how they are placed, which is more relevant for this - which messed with how handbrake sets up storage paths to "watch" and output from how it's installed. The people in the reddit thread were talking about how it's essentially a "1-click solution" to change the already-existing apps to fit that update, but they didn't really talk much about when installing from scratch. Which is where that guide by Theo about radarr and sonarr really helped out, because it made me familiar with the finnicky nature of the storage options and premade datasets when installing something. So this is what solved it: (I had already deleted handbrake quite a while ago, so at this point it's without the app installed) I made a dataset for handbrake, in /mnt/HDDs/Applications/ with permissions set to user, group, and other, with root and read/write/execute (I figured why not, I didn't really feel like taking it one permission at a time and I'm fine with leaving it as it is now, but up to you (the reader) if you want to be more cautious about it). I did not make a config sub-dataset like the sonarr/radarr guide suggests for sonarr/radarr. I then installed handbrake with mostly the default options still as they are. However, I left the config storage to iXVolume because I figured it's not something I need to be messing with anywhere other than in the UI for the app and there it was already working fine previously - and then I changed all of the other storage options to Host paths with a folder I've set up myself. (I should've made more folders for it in order to separate the pre-encoded from the re-encoded video files, but I just wanted to get it over with to see how it goes.) So I gave it a shot, and it works fine now. Well, kind of. I still can't see the HDDs folder, although I could at one point during my trials and errors but then it wouldn't give me access so I decided to try something else. But now the built-in view of "storage" in the app's UI can see the video files just fine, in a place where I can place them; because Applications isn't accessible (nor viewable) to place files in, which is where I'm guessing Handbrake had assigned as its "storage" pathway before. Anyway, lesson learned without too much harm done, that I'm gonna have to mix things up a bit to work with the updated electric eel version of truenas scale, since HexOS is still meant to be used with the version it came with during its installation. Thank you for the help! It did push me in the right direction.

I would also want to do this on a router level But for this the 'Apps' should get it's own IP address, then in the router (unifi) i can traffic them trough the VPN So I would love to be able when installing an app, to have the possibility to let it get it's own IP Then i could make a VLAN for al the devices that needs to go over the internet trough an VPN

For detailed installation instructions, please refer to this thread: Illustrated Installation Guide - START HERE! =)

Agreed. When creating a VPN connection, have options to route specific apps with this connection, or the whole system, or whole system but exclude specific apps.