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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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

@Dylan OMG OMG OMG I figured it out! I went into TrueNAS and found the Applications dataset, found the permissions and everything looked fine there, but I also noticed that under the Applications folder there was the Plex folder. Only the Plex folder. Because I had only installed Plex, nothing else. And since I uninstalled it, it shouldn't still be there. The fact it is still there, I reasoned, could be causing issues when it tries to install. I figured it must not have fully deleted the folder during the uninstall. So I deleted that folder and then tried to install Plex again through HexOS and IT WORKED! So happy! Thank you for pointing me in the right place!

Hello, We just processed the refund for the 2 pack you purchased. Please give it 5 business days for the credit to show up. Apologies for the delay in your refund. We appreciate you supporting HexOS. Happy holidays.

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.

We did deploy some hotfixes already but they were minor. The bigger issues are still being looked at by the team. We are on the trail of breadcrumbs now and should have most of this resolved soon. Thanks for everyone's patience and understanding.

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.

😎 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.

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?

They did post on X.

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.

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/

Be careful with the bump up because I have seen several apps that have the http at one port number and the https at the next number up. Not sure that matters in this case but it is quite confusing.

We don't have a feature like that at this time. You can try using something like immich-go to help with your migration

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!

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

Fixes are inbound! We've been working on this since the first reports came in and believe we have identified the issues and are staging another hotfix deployment for later today.

Wow, there is a lot to unpack here. I am a long time IT person but not a NAS or networking expert so let me hit the easier stuff and someone related to HexOS can hit the harder stuff. 1) The HexOS can be thought of as a large but active hard disc drive. The raid choice you make will spread data among all the drives to give data recovery but don't think of the NAS as a backup unless you specifically and only set it up that way. You can have a nice (finances permitting) desktop machine that you run all your apps and do all your work. Once a week an app can write your data out to the NAS. If that's what you want, get two external hard drives instead. Those drives would be cheaper. HexOS (built on TrueNAS) is so much more. 2) Yes you can but you will find out quickly there is a LOT of ways to do that. I'm not sure HexOS has a baked in option but it may. If it doesn't there are lots of app within TrueNAS. And if you really want to go down a rabbit hole there are apps like Docker/Dockage that open up another whole world of thousands of apps. 3) If you talking adding or managing datasets/folders in HexOS you will be working in TrueNAS to do that. That may have recently changed but I am at least one HexOS/TrueNAS update behind. 4) if you have created a HexOS NAS you can create SMB folders to import data. That is just one basic options because there are apps that can help load your new NAS. I'm not sure if I have answered your questions. If I missed your points let me know. There are a lot of folks here with different levels of expertise before you get to the development staff itself. If your a first timer people are happy to help but really focused on the overall development and support of the core product. What makes things more complicated is that a lot of work is still done in TrueNAS, not HexOS. So a product developed to make interaction within TrueNAS less often is still pretty TrueNAS heavy. This is probably also not the product you want if you really don't to use TrueNAS or develop a basic understanding of it. Many solutions for adding an app will come from youtube and that is risky because they are running specifically on TrueNAS and there are new versions of the product every few months. We have seen here that a "small" TrueNAS change can cause a lot of confusion and work for the HexOS devs. Don't expect to be taught TrueNAS here but you will have to learn parts of it. If you are considering HexOS it looks like it has a lot of potential for folks who want to set something up without worry that they need to get an IT degree though you should do more research and get more opinions than just mine. The only reason you need to look quickly is the cost of the lifetime license is currently $199 but is expected to go up to $299 when the application goes live. There are discussions of a monthly subscription but right now most of the effort is focused on getting to the go live state. There will be lots of news yet to come.

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.

Hey, Backups are done over the local network or Internet (which requires additional setup) and are done using the existing network connection. Using an USB cable to connect to your server is not supported. What exactly do you want to backup from your devices? There are different ways and apps, depending on what you want to do. Backing up pictures from your phones (and Mac maybe?) you can use Immich, which is a one click install app in Hexos. For documents you could use something like paperless, which requires manual loading of the files and is more like a document manager, rather then a simple backup solution. And there are other solutions to backup every kind of data. For your family, not living in your house, to be able to backup to your server you need to either setup a VPN or Cloudflare Tunnel or similar. Hexos is using ZFS and in ZFS it's called RaidZ1 and not Raid5 🙂 Also please post your specs of your Server which you want to use, this way we can identify possible incompatibilities and issues beforehand and mitigate them.

Hey, yes this is a good idea, I currently have a similar setup, Hexos as main Server, Unraid as on site backup and a synology NAS as an off-site backup, planing to replace Unraid with Hexos once the HDD prices are normalising again. Let's first start with backups: Since Buddy Backup currently isn't available, you will need to setup the task replication in the truenas GUI to backup to your other Hexos. Since this is not in your local network you need to setup a VPN connection or URL or similar to be able to connect both server together. For the backup to your Unraid, you can use rsync to backup to it. Having app failover is an entire different and way more complex topic. The above backup is only creating snapshot but it's no live backup meaning it cannot be used for app failover since the data is not live. Hexos/Truenas Scale doesn't have app failover support, this is exclusively reserved for the entireprise stuff. I know that some apps have some way to have this, but this depends on the app and requires additional setup per app etc. The easiest thing would likely be running everything in a VM in proxmox and have High Availability setup, but this comes with it's own set of restrictions. Unfortunately, there is no easy or moderate complex way to set up app failver

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.,

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

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?

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!

Hey, did you ever find answers to this? I have a similar use case.

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

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

Sorry, if this has been asked before & posted elsewhere. Would be handy to have app support for steam caching, especially for big/medium family's/house hold share. I can understand this will not be on the radar as yet, while sorting other issues out/beta etc

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.

I have tried several NAS Systems before, none of them had a official good functioning mobile app, where i could quickly check basic stuff on the fly. Stuff like Updating Apps, restarting containers / VMs, restarting the entire Server, only basic things like this would be awesome. With the Management being Cloud based right now, it should not even be that big of an issue i think.