Home Server OS Recommendations

Kidge · 23 Mar 2017 at 19:20

Hi Guys,

After having some trouble with Windows Update on Server 2012 Essentials I've decided to give up and start from fresh with a different OS.

Preferably looking for something which is free and happy to spend a little time getting it set up.

What I'm looking for is something that will do the following:

- Store all my data (music/pics/movies)
- Share these to multiple clients (Plex & Windows/Samba shares)
- Automatically back up the data to an external HDD maybe once a week
- Automatically (or easily) updates it's own server OS

Would something like Ubunto Server be good to try?

neodude · 23 Mar 2017 at 20:04

Unraid

SupraWez · 23 Mar 2017 at 20:24

CentOS for nuts and bolt build, or something like FreeNAS.

Kidge · 23 Mar 2017 at 22:06

Cheers, will take a look at book options - is Unraid free as it seems to only give me a trial download?

neodude · 24 Mar 2017 at 09:00

Nah, it's not free. But it's worth buying.

Snapshot · 24 Mar 2017 at 09:18

Have a look at NAS4Free. I'm not sure about automatic backup but syncthing is probably the tool for the job.
unRAID is not free but is $59 for the basic version.

Steveocee · 24 Mar 2017 at 13:01

unRAID is good and worth the money (from someone who has paid). On my main home server I run Ubuntu server, thats also a decent OS if you can get round the CLI

Kidge · 24 Mar 2017 at 22:50

neodude said:
Nah, it's not free. But it's worth buying.

Fair enough, I like the look of FreeNAS so going to give that a try this weekend. If I don't get on with it I'll trial unRAID

nox_uk · 25 Mar 2017 at 12:21

just been watching some videos about unraid - looks pretty amazing what you can do with it

4Qman · 25 Mar 2017 at 22:28

Unraid...

Ive been using it past 6weeks. Plex docker is Flawless, rock solid.

Also have some VMs and other dockers setup.

I can't recommend it enough, I was swayed into looking at it from other members here. I'm very glad I did, the Unraid forum is also amazing.

MassiveJim · 1 Apr 2017 at 14:23

i use nas4free (originally called FreeNAS until someone else "stole" the name)

its pretty easy to setup and has been rock solid in terms of stability for me.
I do have a few quirks with windows machines not being able to see the CIFS shares sometimes, but a reboot of the windows machine resolves that, it is something that I want to tackle but don't have enough knowledge of the freeBSD world to sort.

div0 · 4 Apr 2017 at 11:32

How easy is it to move from xpenology to unraid?

I'm assuming you can't just swap the disks from one system to the other.

neodude · 4 Apr 2017 at 15:14

I would doubt it.

***F1ZZY*** · 4 Apr 2017 at 19:47

I'm in the same boat as the OP and am unsure which route to go down. However, I have been looking at Amahi - any reason that has not been recommended?

4Qman · 5 Apr 2017 at 19:49

Fizzy, have you compared Amahi to unraid?

***F1ZZY*** · 5 Apr 2017 at 20:57

i have no practical experience of either but they are on my shortlist of 2. I cant really decide which way to go before I take the plunge.

nox_uk · 6 Apr 2017 at 08:27

i'd suggest whichever OS you feel most comfortable backing up and recovering from, for any server build