SkullPizza

[SkullPizza]

I am a techdad who has been requested by the wife to create a home server for backing up our family media.

I have other aspirations for this system as well.  I have purchased a refurbished Dell R730 and a rack to mount it on to put it in my basement.  I plan on also having an optical drive that I can burn M-Discs with to have a permanent physical backup to important family photos etc...

A couple questions before I decide if I purchase HexOS:

1.) Will I be able to host a family website with user write permissions using this service where members of my family could all backup their photos on my database where they can upload or download files over the internet or is this only for when people are on the local network?

2.) I would like to use this server to host all sorts of online servers from game servers to being able to access my homes security cameras.  Is this possible with HexOS?  I would be open to having to just remote desktop into a virtual machine, that is fine.  I am just not clear on the planned functionality as a private webserver and I am not the most savvy web admin.... yet.

 

Thanks for the help!

[PsychoWards]

Hey,

1. You can just use Immich, it is a one click install app in Hexos and it will take care of your photo management. It basically works like google photo, but it's running locally on your server, you can create multiple users and share folders, there is an app which is automatically backing up all your pictures from your smartphone, it takes care of everything for you.

2. Truenas, the underlying system supports a lot of apps, from game servers to surveillance apps, so Hexos will be able to run those things as well. In the recent Roadmap it was announced that community templates for apps will come, meaning the number of one click install apps will likely sky rocket with this feature and most commonly used apps will likely rather quickly get a template.

Out of the box, Hexos is only usable in the internal network, as is every NAS software, but you can setup a VPN, or Tailscale or a reverse proxy with a domain to make the required services reachable over the Internet.

You can even create a VM in Truenas to run Home Assistant OS if this is system which you are interested in.

So yes, Hexos can do everything you want, but it's still in beta and some features are currently only accessible via truenas.

If you decide to go with Hexos here are a couple of tips:

- the boot drive can only be used as a boot drive and you cannot store any data on it, meaning there is no point of buying a 1 TB SSD.

- Once you decided for your ZFS pool type (mirrored with 2 disks) RaidZ1 (with 3 or more disks) you cannot change it afterwards and are stuck with this ZFS type, thus plan accordingly. You can also use RaidZ2 (2 drive redundancy) but you need to create the pool in Truenas.

[Mawson]

Hello and welcome!

You can/will be able to do pretty much anything with HexOS, either natively for NAS duties, or through docker apps and virtual machines for more advanced duties like web/game server hosting.

HexOS is more than just a NAS OS, it is also a good platform for all sorts of home hosting! The caveat is that HexOS is currently in early access, so many features are still in development. Currently many things may require leaving the HexOS interface and going to the TrueNAS interface, which while more complicated, is also more powerful.

Please check out the latest development progress update for details on upcoming features and suchlike: https://hexos.com/blog/hexos-q1-status-update

 

[PsychoWards]

I don't know if anyone else in the Hexos community is using M-Disc as a way of backing up data (I had to Google M-Disc, genuinely didn't know what it was).

People commonly use one of following 3 things:

1. Backup to another NAS (might be another Hexos, Truenas, Unraid, Synology, QNAP etc...) Hexos will offer buddy backup to another Hexos server in the future however no details are known so far.

2. Backup into a cloud. (you can encrypt the data before uploading if privacy is a concern)

3. Backup onto an external drive (USB HDD or SSD), this however is currently breaking Hexos.

You can also use a combination of any of those.

The big advantage of doing this, is you can program it to be done automatically, you can choose the frequency, you can have versioning of files which is great if you overwrote a file and want to restore a previous version etc.

It certainly does add additional costs compared to M-Disc but you don't need to do anything manually and you got backups of way more data and way more often compared to doing it manually. And your second server doesn't need to be as powerful and therefore expensive as your main server.