I’ve been running TrueNAS Scale on the new NAS, the one that is home-built (not from a vendor). And I don’t like TrueNAS itself much. It’s yet another power user tool that has removed or gimped its most important and useful features for no apparent reason.

For instance, they’ve removed the recycle bin on SMB so that “Previous Versions” in Windows no longer works. I don’t even run Windows at home on my daily use endpoints, but that’s a real loss. And moronic. Their “solution” is to use ZFS snapshots, but this is a totally different tech that is not as easy and is far more dangerous.

TrueNAS also doesn’t handle certain files generated on the Mac correctly — specifically ones with Alternate Data Stream stuff going on — while commercial NASes seem to deal with these files fine. And no, the supposed common fix did not correct the issue.

The GUI is also pretty bad. It manages to be both too simple and too confusing at the same time somehow, and is missing many features and capabilities (many of which did exist previously and were removed for ideological reasons).

Of the major NASes and their OSes/GUIs I’ve used recently, I’d give QNAP’s a 7, Synology’s an 8.5, and TrueNAS a 4. It feels amateurish and like something I used in the early 2000s.

I will keep using it for now but it’s pretty meh.