Using TrueNAS to replace google drive ?

[Joseph Tremblay]

Hi people,

 

I'm trying to replace my google drive subscription by my old computer with TrueNAS on it, (I havn't done it yet) but I wondered if you can EASILY share files or folders to "clients" (I do a lot of photography and video stuff, so I mainly use goolge drive as a place to give videos or photos to my clients. Can u do that with TrueNAS ? (If not I'll keep my google drive license.)

[Noxitb]

13 minutes ago, Joseph Tremblay said:

Hi people,

 

I'm trying to replace my google drive subscription by my old computer with TrueNAS on it, (I havn't done it yet) but I wondered if you can EASILY share files or folders to "clients" (I do a lot of photography and video stuff, so I mainly use goolge drive as a place to give videos or photos to my clients. Can u do that with TrueNAS ? (If not I'll keep my google drive license.)

Yes you can its not to hard 
Just follow this documentation 
https://www.truenas.com/blog/backup-google-drive-to-freenas/

[Votivee]

Nextcloud sounds like it might be a better solution for your needs. Basically Google Drive/Dropbox but you host it. Very (end) user friendly.

 

You can run Nextcloud as a TrueNAS plugin.

 

One thing to keep in mind is that if your clients are viewing very high res videos your internet may have a tough time keeping up. You can have the fastest computer in the world but your home internet speeds will never be able to compete with Google.

[manikyath]

tempted to say "this belongs in a datacenter", but it's probably cost prohibitive compared to using cloud storage from the big players.

[Laaazz]

Currently using Nextcloud, love it so far. 

Do implement redundancy and a backup scheme. 

[Needfuldoer]

A NAS with drive redundancy is a great solution for you to archive your work on for your own use, but for sharing with clients you should keep your Google Drive account (or go with another managed service like DropBox or OneDrive). There are caveats aplenty:

 

- Your clients' access speed will be limited by your home WAN connection's upload speed. This might not be too bad if you're on symmetrical gigabit fiber, but if you want to do this behind a DOCSIS cable modem with crap upload speed, you're gonna have a bad time. (Remember, their browsing has to share bandwidth with everything else you're doing.)

 

- Your clients are far more likely to trust Google Drive, a service they've heard of from a familiar company, than (for example) joesphotographynas.dyndns.web with a self-signed certificate their browser throws all kinds of alerts about.

 

- You'll have to either put their files behind password-protected categories (like Vimeo does), or you'll have to create accounts for them all individually, if you don't want their stuff accessible to the wide-open Internet.

 

- All the usual "I want to self-host a publicly accessible service" disclaimers apply: You have to be mindful of network security, you have to set up dynamic DNS, and you might have to use outside hosting as a proxy if your ISP blocks unsolicited traffic inbound on ports 80 and 443. (ISPs usually only open those up for business class packages.)

[dbx10]

I'm currently hosting Nextcloud on TrueNAS Core, it's solid but the learning curve is exponential whenever something breaks, and it's far from perfect. The default IP ban for wrong password logins has no timeout and you need to log into the jail, then into the database to manually remove a data point before restarting the jail. Clunky and unnecessary imo.

[Kilrah]

+1 for nextcloud, has the advantage of being able to make a password-protected share link to a folder in no time so no need to make accounts, they'll see thumbnails when they get there, and get a convenient "download all" button.

 

Have it self-hosted on an old PC running ubuntu, there's a snap for it. I have 150Mbps up so that's just fine, my ISP doesn't restrict anything, and I found a domain provider that allows dynamic DNS on any domain they manage. I have 2 domains pointing to the machine so that I can have "cloud.myname.blah" for work/formal/friends and "cloud.anonymousdomain.blah" for sharing stuff to random people on the net off the same instance.

[Gerowen]

I've been hosting my own Nextcloud on a Debian system for years and it works great.  It's basically a PHP site and webdav service that can be extended with "apps" that add additional functionality, from file sharing to embedded document editing to automatic virus scanning, calendar and contact syncing, a chat and video conferencing service, etc.

 

There's multiple different ways to install it, I set up my own Apache webserver, mysql database, etc. and then just dropped the software into its own web root folder.  I know they also do snaps, docker images and such too.