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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

Pushing a live hotfix right now that should address the majority of issues. For those experiencing problems, this should resolve them. If you are still stuck with specific apps, click options, reset, and try again. Still stuck? Email support@hexos.com so we can investigate further.

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

HexOS Gets a Major Upgrade This release introduces an improved Apps experience, new apps, two-factor authentication support, improved GPU support, and Goldeye compatibility. Read more about it on our docsite here at Command Deck Update - December 26, 2025 Also check out our latest blog for even more details! NOTE: This update was applied automatically. You may need to clear your cache.

Hi, very nice update, here are some points of feedback: On the Immich app, it showed the button "An updated configuration is available for this app", which I clicked. Afterwards, my Immich instance wouldn't start up again. I looked into it on the truenas interface where the server container wouldn't start but instead display long error messages before crashing. I noticed that the data storage path was moved from "Host Path" to ixVolume. After I changed it back to the original path, everything worked again. If the switch to an ixVolume is intended, I'd like to have the option (in HexOS) to choose a host path instead, as I want to be able to access my photos via the smb share from another pc. I guess, my trouble with the immich app could have been avoided, if the update notification in the HexOS interface showed the changes clearly, instead of the generic "This will reset every change you made in TrueNAS" message that pops up right now. Also, I installed Nextcloud before it was curated on HexOS, so now I would be interested in migrating my installation to the curated version (without uninstalling and re-installing the app). I tried using the configuration update button, which (expectedly) did not do anything.

at the top of the hub, you can select the store tab and then orders or manage purchases. both should show you how many licenses you have

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

The difference is pretty big, while they do the same thing, they do it very differently. Immich just stores all the images in plain on the file system, all the processing is done on server side, you can connect an external library and if your Immich DB or installation becomes corrupted or breaks and there is no more support for Immich you just take the photos folder and move on. But the admin and everyone who's access to the folder can see all the photos of everyone, so privacy is not that great, but administration is easier and recovery in case of an issue is easy. Ente (FunFact: Ente is German for Duck) is all about privacy. The photos are all encrypted on the server and only the client side can decrypt/see the photos. This also means that the client side needs to do all the processing, but therefore the server can be very low spec (although this doesn't matter in our case, because Hexos needs to run in the first place, so HW specs is not really a concern in any way) and it needs S3 storage and requires more setup an administration. However if your Ente DB becomes corrupted or the Ente app breaks or the Ente dev stops and your app becomes unusable, you lose all your photos, because you cannot access it any other way. But until that happens only your client side device can access the photos and no-one else can.

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!

Damn, launching a major update on the 26th of December is a bold move. I would have launched it in the first week of Jan as people using HexOS and celebrating Christmas would have been travelling (such as myself) and may have unknowingly reset their app settings after the update. I do have a remote connection via Tailscale so it wouldn't be a huge issue but it could have been a ton of work for me and anyone else to re-setup apps, like Immich to enable offsite backups, especially if those people didn't have a laptop or desktop to make the process easier and faster. I'm going to hold off on upgrading the apps until I get back and I'm going to backup all my data and settings before doing so as I don't want to lose access to my existing data and have to reinitialise the sync process. Still, I appreciate the drive to get HexOS features deployed within the calendar year and HexOS continues to improve significantly and return value for money, especially for early adopters.

We are investigating these issues. Thank you for reporting. I can confirm that when a curation gets updated, it can enable things like GPU transcoding. Our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused and we will work to right this in a future update.

Interesting thing just happened: I updated Prowlarr to test the restore functionality for Sonarr and it wasn't reset after the script got updated. Started up and had all the Indexers and connections still set up. Could someone from the HexOS Team maybe elaborate on what those updates in their scripts actually do?

Awesome! I have a Intel iGPU with Jellyfin. How do I know if transcoding is taking advantage of my iGPU now?

Another quarter until version 1.0. Can't say I'm not disappointed, but I get that quality takes time. At least give us a bone in the meantime.

Are we really talking about the "failure" of HexOS before we even go live? I got told off when I brought up this possibility several months ago and I was just talking about having backups. Can we at least wait until either Eshtek sounds a warning of some critical issue, Eshtek misses a checkpoint established for a specific date or they go even more silent?

It's here!!! https://forums.truenas.com/t/truenas-25-10-1-is-now-available/60830. Can't wait until this is integrated into HexOS!

Pretty disappointed with this limitation. I understand the reason to avoid unscrupulous reselling, but I do think there are better ways of avoiding that without these issues. There are probably a lot of people in a similar situation as me; wanting to get a license for a relative as the family tech guy, but not wanting to have to be the sys admin for everyone. I bought a license at release because I support the mission, with no intention of using it until the features got more flushed out (still on plain TrueNAS). I am in the process of building a NAS for my father, which I intended to set up with a HexOS license so he could use buddy backup and some apps as a relatively nontechnical user. The HexOS interface is simple enough I think he can grasp it. But if I have to be an admin for his NAS anyway I might as well just set up Tailscale and rsync on TrueNAS. I understand it's a sale price and I'll probably end up getting him his own but it just feels like a slap for people that bought in to support and I hate feeling like I'm throwing money away. I'm no business major but it seems like expanding the user base would be prioritized given the possibility of genuinely useful subscription features coming down the pipe. Anyways. Just my $0.02. Still love what you guys are building.

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

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.

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.

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!

With LTT Official Folding Month VIII (Nov 1st - Dec 6th) coming up, It would be really nice to see a how to guide to get FoldingAtHome easily working from anyone who knows how. I just put a request out for help for anyone to provide a guide if possible. Here's hoping. https://hub.hexos.com/topic/3927-foldingathome-ltt-official-folding-month-viii-nov-1st-dec-6th-help-setup-hexos/

I am battling ACL type mismatch issues for the "Applications" system share after the Immich config upgrade changed the postgres data path and I had to manually move data there. Not sure if I caused this situation by moving files or if the "config upgrade" will do that by default, but it's quite probably people going through the same issues and manual solutions as me would end up in the same situation Current status is: No SMB share config change is allowed on the "Applications" system SMB share; no chaning its access permissions nor even disabling the share altogether. Which is problematic as it now stores a database for a privacy-sensitive service, which now landed on a "public-by-default" datastore shared through the LAN. I highly advise people with limited free time during this holiday season to not perform any such new "config upgrade" until either things are sorted our, or you have enough spare time to fix breakages. There is no immediate issue with not doing it now, and no huge immediate benefit either, so just wait it out for now while the adventurous like me try to survive the unforseen consequences 🙂

A fine attempt to clarify some of the conflicting nomenclature of how storage verbiage is used. I hope this helps!! (clear as mud, right??)

Just got the update and have this feedback on trying it out on immich: Thank god I didn't start with Nextcloud. Is this the expected behavior? Or is something rather pointing to me having done something wrong that ended up in data being left behind? Maybe I didn't read a warning prompt right? I think I'll land on my feet moving things manually for immich, but I have a lot more users on Nextcloud and I'm not sure I feel confident going through this again with Nextcloud... Let me know if another communication channel is more appropriate to discuss this further PS: please don't roll out risky things during holiday seasons. It's not worth it.

Live fixes do not require users to perform any action locally. They hit our servers and affect everyone automatically. We will get you sorted through support. We are still tracking down why some reboots are losing connectivity to the deck. If you are comfortable with truenas UI, you can revert to a previous working boot by going to System > Boot and them clicking the activate icon on the right for the previous boot environment. Then restart.

😎 All part of the Beta experience lol As long as I don't lose my ACTUAL data I'm cool. Ripping all those DVDs was a PITA.

I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but immich-go can be run by using the shell in truenas. At the risk of outing myself, an LLM of your choosing may or may not be helpful in suggesting some command syntax. (if you do that... please double check that your command makes sense using the immich-go documentation first, and you have an option of running the command in a 'test' mode where nothing is actually done just to verify your settings.) I'd also recommend using tmux to allow the script to run in the background if you have a transfer that is large, and for a very large transfer, I found it necessary to split it up into smaller chunks.

Oh wow! I could understand the mounts (if different than the default locations). The rest like API keys are a bit confusing unless you weren't able to reconnect to your previous database. It would be nice if the interface perhaps showed a comparison between what the existing configuration is and what the updated one looks like so that changes could be minimised before updating. That way, if I have to move a mount manually before the upgrade I would do that so that once the update is done everything works exactly as before I switch to the curated version.

They did post on X.

ZCMK123's post got me up and running. Check it out and see if it helps you.

So I cant speak on the uGreen HW but I can tell you that if you decide to find normal computer hardware plopping in the boot SSD and hard drives it will take off and run " NOTE depending on the network chipset you have" without any hitch. I am running the same SSD that I started HEXOS "since launch" and have tested about 12 different motherboard cpu combos and the only issue has been a network chipset that the underlying Linux os didnt like.,

There is no announced timeframe at this time. The benefit is being able to make bigger pools.

Hey, no this will not work as you've described it. With 2 drives Hexos will automatically create a mirrored pool, meaning your data will be stored on both drives at the same time and you will only have the capacity of 1 drive but you can lose 1 drive without losing data. You cannot create a Pool without parity with more then 1 drive. A RaidZ Pool type cannot be changed after it was created, so you will be stuck with your mirrored pool and you cannot expand it. If you then throw in your 4 drives from the old NAS, Hexos will create a new RaidZ1 pool, which has the capacity of the numbers of drives -1 (capacity of 3 drives in your case). You can then copy the data from your mirrored pool to your RaidZ1 pool. If however, your mirrored pool does not have enough capacity, get yourself a 3. drive to create a RaidZ1 from the beginning, copy your data over and afterwards add your drives from your NAS to the pool or create a new pool. (expanding a pool can only be done with 1 drive at a time and takes some time). Also make sure all your drives have the same capacity or else Hexos will not group them together.

I did about 8 or 9 times now. And while I have done a lot of volume testing I have everything backed up and continue to treat this experience as a beta test. I'm not sure we are far enough down the path to treat it as anything else. People are still yelling the Immich is broken and how can Eshtek have such a crap product. And when they find out it was actually a TrueNAS change you start to see complaints about how this product can't accommodate this type of change. Then the complaints asking for a conversion process from old to new but that was manual so it didn't work for everyone. So now people have partial changes from several tries and a broken product. Then guys like me who left the safety of the TrueNAS catalog and followed Docker install videos. so I am not making things any easier. I made a joke a while back that go-live would be everyone formatting their systems and all starting from the same point. I said it a second time not to long ago because of this Immich specifically because I wasn't joking anymore. Now I can't see any way around it. How do you explain to the support team everything that got you to the situation your in? They know that firestorm is coming. So I do apologise to responding with this doom and gloom post to your very simple and straightforward request. I sincerely hope that they have a way to help you because I had to reload 1.25 TB of images and almost 10TB of movies (with a few family vacation videos sprinkled in. Honestly, I thought that was why rsync was going to be the answer but I guess nothing is ever that easy. Best of luck, really.

This is now showing correctly for me. Thank you!

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.

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.

Great to see the progress being made compared to the early launch last year, I'm exited to see where it goes with the new upcoming roadmap. While I'll personally will be waiting till a few more curated apps will be available (such as Kometa and Bazarr) it seems at least a good solid foundation will be standing with the 1.0 launch. Keep it up guys!

It would be nice if there were features that allow TrueNas/HexOS to run in parallel like Proxmox and VMWare. Truenas has capabilities of running virtual machines, if we could have the ability of having those VMs switch from one host to another if one fails then I believe that this would be fully capable of replacing Proxmox/VMWare.

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.

I'll just answer myself. It is. I had previosly updated TrueNas to Fangtooth which is not supported and I messed up the boot pool so I wanted to reinstall but was worried about it (I was thinking on just dropping HexOS and use TrueNas directly with the latest version). I was able to reinstall everything following these steps (I had a recent copy of the truenas config): Follow steps 1 to 6 Update TrueNas from the UI to Fangtooth Reimport TrueNas config profit This was easier than I though and I didn't lose any data.

GUI for creating Directories and Sub-Directories in a Folder aka Dataset

Ive got qbittorrent and plex running already but from what I can tell setting up airvpn isnt that simple - so would love an easier way to do that for qbittorrent specifically. And nextcloud. Have tried to set it up using the godawful truenas instructions but to no avail.

Cloudflare is awesome, and I definitely want to see native support for Tunnels. It is fairly simple for a technical person to setup but it would be nice to have a wrapper within HexOS for like a one-click setup. Basically you buy a domain in Cloudflare, link your account to HexOS and it will perform the necessary config to setup the tunnel, route application services to your domain, and apply ACLs based on what you already have in HexOS. Although, you do need a domain to use Cloudflare Zero Trust. Tailscale is another option, and does not require a domain to use. As of right now the docker app already runs great. I imagine they could add a simple wizard—the current setup process has a lot of options but only requires an auth key to be set for it to work.

An app would be awesome