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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.

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.

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

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.

Looks like we have 25.10 in the wild (https://forums.truenas.com/t/truenas-25-10-0-is-now-available/57343), hope we can see a HexOS update based on this soon...

here are some low power server builds (not necessarily on hexos/truenas) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI/edit?gid=0#gid=0 These are just some general things to keep in mind you can can expect each hdd and ssd to add 2-7w at idle. not using a discrete gpu will save you 10-20w at idle keeping peripherals unplugged (monitor, keyboard, mouse) help a bit old amd cpus have trouble if c states are enabled. (c states are kinda sorta low power modes) fan power draw ads up skip the rgb

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.

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.

In addition to what M said, low idle power draw doesn't necessarily mean, low performance hardware, modern high performance HW also has amazing power savings potential & idle power draw, so you don't need to go low performance, or old HW. Some easy wins are disabling unused HW/parts in the BIOS (Audio, onboard NIC if a dedicated NIC is used, Wifi etc...)

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

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!

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.

I have the Intel X520 card in mine (SFP instead of RJ45) and it worked after a reinstall of HexOS. I recommend using Fiber when you can because RJ45 gets hot quickly, Also make sure it's not a clone card, they seem to be out there in the wild quite often. One final thing - with mine it only wanted to use the Intel SFP modules, probably not an issue with just RJ45 though if you run into it you can flash the EEPROM on the to accept any modules.

I tried following the recommended guides - frankly too time consuming/complicated for a non-technical person. Instead I went the uninstall/reinstall route, it's very easy if you can backup/re-upload your content (which takes forever 😑). The below post explains how to reinstall. It requires re-creating users/settings and logging in again on the mobile app.

If you guys are stuck, please email support@hexos.com and we will schedule a time to work with you on this.

It did. We wanted to build in a better solution to address this, but as I stated in the OP, it would have required a massive divergence of focus from our team to build a solution within the UI itself. We ultimately decided putting out this post and offering 1:1 assistance to those affected was the best course of action. We are offering 1:1 support to anyone that needs it. Just email support@hexos.com and we'll schedule a time. I mention in the OP our plans to be able to better address this in the future via HexOS Local.

First, a huge thank you to @lnkd for posting the actual steps to do this. All I did was follow everything they said and take pictures, so really all credit goes to them. Original post here: Prepare TrueNAS for reinstall: 1. Login to TrueNAS web interface – go to deck.hexos.com and click Settings: Then click the TrueNAS icon: 2. Once logged into TrueNAS, go to System > General Settings > Manage Configuration > Download File: 3. Read the note presented when you click Download File: 4. Click Save: 5. If you have encrypted datasets, go to Datasets > select the encrypted dataset > Export Key: 6. Now it is time to shutdown the server. In the top right of the TrueNAS web UI click the power icon and click shutdown: 7. Make your changes to the hardware that you would like – for me I added a 10 GB network card to run off fiber. 8. Prepare the HexOS installation drive by following these steps: https://hub.hexos.com/topic/103-illustrated-installation-guide-start-here/ 9. In your router settings, give the new hardware the same IP as your old one, then restart TrueNAS to grab the correct IP. 10. Once rebooted you can confirm on the server the IP address is correct: 11. Login to the TrueNAS web interface with the username and password you set during install (username should be truenas_admin). 12. Confirm your version on the dashboard – if needed, apply the update to the server: a. To confirm what version you need check the filename of the .tar file you downloaded from your configuration. It will have the version number on the end of it. b. Select the same version from the upgrade screen and confirm you want to switch to that upgrade train. c. Apply the pending updates and the system will reboot. 13. Go to Storage > Import Pool > find your zpool: 14. I have two pools so I will import them both. 15. Go into System > General Settings > Manage Configuration > Upload file: 16. The server will reboot after the configuration is applied. Log back into the TrueNAS server once the reboot is finalized. 17. If, like me, you replaced the network cards you will need to login directly to the server and adjust the IP settings: 18. Setup your new interface with the primary IP in CIDR notation, then you can log back into the TrueNAS server. 19. To setup apps, you need to go to Apps > Configuration > Unset Pool: 20. Restart your TrueNAS server then go back into Apps > Configuration > Choose Pool: 21. Once the pool is set you will see your apps again and be able to start them. 22. Navigate to the HexOS Interface (http://deck.hexos.com), unclaim your old server and claim your new one: 23. I ran into an issue where no matter what password I input it would not take it: 24. Currently troubleshooting that to be able to claim my HexOS server in the deck. All of my apps and storage are up and running so I will report back here when I fix this issue.

I wonder if Eshtek is ready to have an app store separate of TrueNAS. This would require them to have a much larger responsibility in situation where an apps author make a move like the Immich issue. This doesn't seem to be likely because what does Eshtek get for this immense extra effort? Just more work and responsibility it seems.

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.

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, It seams to be possible to use a GPU with multiple apps, but you need to login into truenas to do this: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/can-multiple-apps-utilize-the-same-gpu.99757/#post-712876

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.

Thanks for confirming. I managed to successfully upgrade last night using the rsync method. Although I had to research how to do the SSH part, perhaps you could add this instruction for others? Otherwise the method comes across as very intimidating when in fact it was relatively straightforward.

i believe there is a skip setup button now. i would skip setup and then go into truenas to adopt your existing pool

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.

apple silicon seems amazing and sometimes i can't shut up about how it would be amazing if i could run a home lab on apple silicon or apple comes out with a gaming handheld. looking forward to hearing what hardware you end up on. most important piece of advice is before you commit to your parts list, you should post it here and see if anyone has any recommendations. so many little things to keep in mind that are non factors when building say a gaming pc.

i can ask around but no promises

hmm at this time these options can only be done in truenas ui. i would imagine at least some of the options should come into hexos ui but i will check in with the team for you

Might want to have https://hexos.com/blog/ redirect there also. Navigating directly still goes to the old blog.

Thank you to you and everyone that put together these tutorials. I was excited to give this a try, but even with the tutorials, this seems to be a less than straightforward process. On the first guide linked, I immediately encountered discrepancies between how my Truenas was configured/behaved and how the guide assumed your Truenas would function. First, the dataset I created did not seem to have the same "strip ACLs" button shown. My permissions section looked a little different as a result, but I feel comfortable tweaking the list manually to make it match the guide. The bigger issue for me was that I couldn't get my computer (MacOS via terminal) to SSH into the Truenas server. I kept getting a permissions denied error. I tried a small amount of googling, but I'm not sure I have the time or patience to try to attempt this. The second tutorial seems a little less beginner friendly. I thiiiink I could try to figure it out, but immediately after my first attempt of tweaking the permissions, I'm getting endless "operation not permitted" errors in the terminal. This is clearly user error on my end, but I wanted to post this for other HexOS users here - I definitely feel like I am the target audience of introductory homelabber that doesn't care to tinker with these things and I wanted to share my experience for other's visibility before they invest the time themselves. Unfortunately, I think it will be a better use of my time to wipe and start over on my immich backup. Hopefully they stay true to their word and this is the last time they make this sort of change, or I will probably look elsewhere for backing up my photos in the future. Thank you again to those that took the time to try to document guides on this process!

I am not a beta tester, i know i bought a beta test software. My issue is that after almost a whole year i can scan the forums and most issues someone will state, you will need to access truenas to fix it. If i need to access the free software to fix the paid software then I been duped and mislead after a year.. I can see that the team has curated a few more apps and that's great, but I gave yet to see the VM workspace. Will that be a 1.0 release or 2.0, 3.0 etc.? Yes, I understand this is beta but I need more meat than little morsels here and there. Honestly I'm just blabbing I don't run hex because the only reason I got hex OS is to not have to figure things out in truenas and creating simple shares for backup failed and i had to access truenas to fix permission. At that point i gave up and would rather use my electricity for something else. Don't get me wrong im waiting for the day that i can just point and click and be done.

Additional Apps We’ve just added Jellyfin, Home Assistant, and qBittorrent! And this is just the beginning, thanks to our new curation process, we expect many more apps to come online soon. Intro to App Curation We've added an interface to the HexOS frontend to make iterating on apps easier and to let the community contribute their own curations. By enabling Dev Mode in Preferences, you'll unlock the Custom Script option for app installs. From there, you can tweak existing install scripts or create new ones then share them with friends or submit them to the official HexOS curation templates. Right now, the feature focuses on streamlining the app install process. Soon we plan to surface installer questions directly in the UI and automate post-install steps (such as in-app setup wizards). That work depends on the in-development Local UI project, we will share more news about this in the future. We'd love your feedback as we refine this, let us know what's working well and where you're running into friction. Official Docs We've launched a documentation site! This new resource brings together everything you need to know about HexOS, including getting started guides, feature documentation, troubleshooting help, release notes, and community resources. Along with App Curation, we are opening the docsite up for community contributions. Learn about how to contribute here. - Docsite contributions - App Curation Folder Wizard Arrives We've extended our simple folder creation interface with a new wizard-driven process that unlocks specialized use cases like encrypted folders and Time Machine backups. With this foundation in place, we're now ready to move forward on bigger features including Snapshots, Replication, and Buddy Backup. First Flight Updates We've made improvements to First Flight, our onboarding experience, to help new users get up and running with HexOS more easily. Key improvements include: - Progress Tracking: When you complete tasks shown in the First Flight modal, it will pop up again to show you which tasks you've completed and what's still left to do - Persistent Banner: A banner now lives at the top of every page, keeping First Flight guidance accessible throughout HexOS This feature is designed to make the HexOS onboarding process a little more intuitive, especially for users new to home server management. --- NOTE: This update was applied automatically. You may need to clear your cache. Help with clearing you cache is available here.

Thank you for your reply, @Mobius. That does make sense. To your final note, hopefully by stable, if we manually create these vdevs in TrueNAS, they can play nicely with HexOS. — I agree: I believe folks recommend the special vdev to have the same redundancy as the data vdevs; if it were to be added, hopefully that recommendation could be prominent. I've heard mixed things about performance: for many-file directories, it can feel snappier, which is what I hope. SLOG: ah, I had another angle. My main interest are a couple of wired Macs on our network as Macs write to SMB synchronously (straight to HDDs), without fast RAM-first writes like Windows machines. But with an SLOG, Macs write to this faster SLOG vdev, allowing the transfer to complete faster. So with an SLOG, Macs have virtually identical write performance as Windows. But without the SLOG, Macs write a little slower. We definitely use a UPS; it's a solid investment for data integrity as you get PLP for the whole server! A great recommendation.

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?

I ran into the issue that my boot drive was corrupted and I had to restore my HexOS install from scratch. I found posts that said basically just reinstall it but nothing that explained the process. I had several issues, when I reinstalled HexOS it wanted to wipe my raid, once i disconnected the raid and went through the initial setup, I had no shares. So I wanted to document this so that others with this issue find a solution instead trying to rename and recreate shares and move data between datasets. This was done after I figured out a process for doing this so sorry if I missed any steps. Step 1. Remove the bad boot drive. Step 2: Disconnect the Raid drives. Step 3: Install your new boot drive and usb HexOS install media. Step 4: Follow the standard install process, including setting your admin account and claiming your server. When you finish the setup you will not have any disks so you will name your server and just continue. Step 5: Shutdown the system. Step 6: Reconnect your raid drives and boot up. Step 7: Log in to the TrueNAS gui by going to the IP address of your server in the browser and using the credentials you set up during install Username: truenas_admin Password: <whatever you entered at install>. Step 8: Go to Storage Tab and select Import Pool. 9: Select your pool from the drop down it should be named 'HDDs' and select Import. It will take a few minutes to import and complete. At this point the storage should be detected in HexOS and you should be able to start creating shares, but your existing folders and shares will not have returned. To get your shares back you must recreate them by renaming your datasets and naming them back as follows: Step 1: Under Datasets you can find all of your existing data on the RAID. Find the Dataset you want to restore in HEXOS and note the name. Step 2: Back in HexOS go to the Folder tab and select 'New Folder' Note: you may want to recreate your old users manually or create your folders with public access and recreate the users and add permissions later. Step 3: Create a new folder with the same name as the Dataset but add a 1 (In this case 'Plex1'). Make sure to keep the array the same 'HDDs; and give it the permissions you want (this can be adjusted later). Step 4: Back in TrueNAS go to Shares and select the edit button on the 'Plex1' share, depending on screen resolution you may need to scroll the horizontal scroll bar to the right. Step 5: In the side bar remove the '1' from the Path or use the drop down to select the original shared folder, then click into the Name field which should auto update and remove the 1. Step 6 Scroll down and click 'Save' and you will be prompted to restart the SMB service, do this and your share should be updated. Step 7: Navigate to the dataset tab select the 'Plex1' dataset and click delete on the right side. It will make you confirm by typing the whole dataset path. Step 8: When this is done you should be able to refresh the folders tab on the HexOS page and see the updated folder name (it took a minute to refresh for me). Redo this for each share that you wish to recreate. Once I did this and set up the users and permissions correctly, other servers I used to connect to my shares started working seamlessly. I didn't experience this but I can imagine you may run into some permissions issues since the new users in HexOS could have different IDs than before. Unfortunately you would need to manually adjust permissions on the files and folders. P.S. I imagine minutes after posting this someone will tell me I am dumb and should have done it this way, or someone else posted better over here. If that's the case let me know and Ill point to a better example, but when I needed help I couldn't find it.

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).

It is a must these days to have TailScale support, especially for secure remote access. It is far too easy to mess up a WireGaurd/OpenVPN Config, if the goal is security and simplicity, Tailscale VPN access should be a high priority.

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

I’m hoping that Tailscale support is also in the works - 🤞yes?

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

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.