filemanager VS middleware

File Browser

Thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of dufs and it looks very solid. Fileserver[0] is another popular choice, though it's more GUI-oriented for file operations.

[0]: https://filebrowser.org/

The OnlyOfffice desktop app is a pretty good and free alternative to Microsoft Office Suite. You can simply install it on your local machine for offline access.

OnlyOfffice is also self-hostable as a web app for a cloud alternative to Google Sheets.

Filebrowser is a self-hostable alternative to Google Drive.

There's a pull request open to integrate OnlyOffice with Filebrowser for self-hosted google-drive + google docs.

https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser/pull/1420

For strictly local use, Google's Nearby share is technically FOSS but the documentation is basically non-existent and a proper Linux implementation is not here yet. Alternatives aren't hard to find though, with Mint's Warpinator or KDE Connect having worked well for me.

For non-local use (everything out of Bluetooth range), you almost have to trust a third party and it really depends on your use case. Want to send your friend a file or host pictures of your birthday for multiple people to download? For the former magic wormhole works great, for the later you could almost spin up a nextcloud or similar (personally I like https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser ). Want to regularly send files from device 1 to device 2? Now classic sync solutions like syncthing become really viable.

If everything else fails, FTP always has your back

I have been looking for a file browser which can run in game mode and is reasonably user friendly for simple file operations (copy/delete/rename, etc). Most people recommend Dolphin. it does work but there are issues: the color scheme looks really weird in game mode. context menu does not like game mode, either. Got file browser working (https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser) in game mode, which essentially an Edge app accessing a web server on localhost (running as user service). It took some time to set up but the end result is exactly what I would like to have.

File Browser - For access to the files on my NAS

filebrowser has user management plus sharing capabilities

Filebrowser suppports multiple shares with different expiration dates. It also offers file previews and generates QR Codes for the shares.

NextCloud is great for this, but if we're talking sharing files from your sync'd project collection, I'd probably instead recommend Filebrowser. You can point it to the same data store that syncthing is using and it'll make it easy to share the projects. Note that in order to do this you'll need to open up and expose filebrowser publicly. The simplest way to do this would probably be a cloudflare tunnel and for sharing files like this ad-hoc I don't see any issues with their TOS. For things like SyncThing though you'll still wanna do conventional port forwarding. the DIY approach instead of CloudFlare tunnel would be to port forward, set up a dynamic dns record, and set up letsencrypt certs

For storage options, most people either purchase a NAS (network attached storage) or re-purpose an older computer using either TrueNAS or unraid. If you're looking to just purchase one, the most popular brand is synology, but their models can be a bit pricey.

https://www.truenas.com/ if you just want to use it as network storage.

Synology if you need prebuilt. If you want to build DIY NAS, take a case that can hold as many drives as you want, take a consumer-grade mobo and Intel/AMD CPU (really doesn't matter for NAS), purchase 1 x SSD for OS and as many drives as you need, deploy something like TrueNAS (https://www.truenas.com/) or Starwinds SAN and NAS (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas), configure RAID (for redundancy, preferably RAID-6) and share the storage to your NUC as iSCSI/NFS/SMB. The second option will require some effort to accomplish but will be more flexible and deliver more performance.

There is no such thing as an ideal OS. Some of the products are better in some of the areas, while other software is better in other areas. For example, Proxmox is the virtualization platform that is targeting virtualization needs. It has support for software RAID, but it doesn't mean that this is the primary feature that is constantly developed. Any NAS OS basically doing the same but targeting storage and sharing things over the virtualization or anything else. So, you need to use whatever is better for the particular use case. Use proxmox on the virtualization host and NAS OS as a storage engine. Or run hypervisor and NAS OS as the VM. As per the alternatives to OMV, you can take a look at Starwinds SAN and NAS (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas), TrueNAS (https://www.truenas.com/), or even pure Debian + Cockpit (https://cockpit-project.org/)

The second is storage. If you need any of the storage sharing, deploy NAS OS as the VM in proxmox, like Starwinds SAN and NAS (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas) or OMV (https://www.openmediavault.org/), or TrueNAS (https://www.truenas.com/). As you mentioned, you need to cross-flash the perc into IT mode and pass through the controller into VM, but you need a separate from the controller drive for proxmox to be able to PCI-E passthrough the card into VM. Then, configure software RAID and reshare the storage to the proxmox via NFS/iSCSI (that will improve your skills in storage stack and storage protocols).

You can also go another route with Proxmox and NAS OS as a VM. TrueNAS or Starwinds SAN&NAS can be used. https://www.truenas.com/

You would need some sort of NAS device to act as a file server (you obviously can't just plug a HDD directly into a switch). Some consumer routers have USB ports where you can plug in an external HDD, though they frequently have speed issues with the USB ports. You could buy something from QNAP, Synology, etc. or build your own TrueNAS.

I run plex on my lab, but if I didn't have that, I would probably buy a cheap server and run TrueNAS. https://www.truenas.com/ I personally have a whole vmware network using it for storage, but as just a plex server with a bunch of storage would be a viable alternative for a single host and have the storage plus the raid benefits of not having to worry about disk failures.

Take a look at TrueNAS or Starwinds SAN&NAS as a NAS OS options. https://www.truenas.com/

Windows built-in iSCSI server is slow. If you don't mind replacing it, try using TrueNAS, Starwinds SAN&NAS, or even Linux (Ubuntu Server) VM running the iSCSI target server. Either solution should overperform the Windows alternative.