How the lab started
My home infrastructure began with FreeNAS in 2016. It gave me an early reason to learn storage pools, network shares, permissions and the difference between keeping data and simply keeping a server running. As the lab grew into Proxmox, Docker and self-hosted applications, the storage layer became a shared dependency for many other projects.
Screenshot evidence
Why storage deserves its own project
Media servers, photo libraries, backups, virtual machines and container volumes all fail differently when storage is slow, unavailable or incorrectly permissioned. I treat the NAS as infrastructure with its own health checks, capacity planning and recovery procedures.
What I work with
- ZFS pools and dataset separation
- SMB and NFS shares for different consumers
- Ownership and ACL troubleshooting
- Snapshots before risky changes
- Monitoring capacity, errors and service availability
- Separating irreplaceable data from reproducible application containers
How it has evolved
The platform and hardware have changed, but the design goal remains the same: keep storage understandable, backed up and independent enough that an application rebuild does not become a data-loss event.
Use non-critical disks for learning, keep backups outside the pool and test restore procedures before treating the system as primary storage.
Install TrueNAS on dedicated hardware or a VM with direct test disks, create a small ZFS pool, then add datasets, permissions, shares and snapshots one layer at a time.