Selfhosted

So, I understand this is Ian only, I will leave out NextCloud.

I would personally say Ceph. This is a storage solution meant to be spread among a bunch of different hosts. Basically, it operates on RAID 5 principles AND replicated storage.

Personal setup: single host 12 ea. 10TB HDDs.

To start, it does go ahead and generates the parity data for the storage bucket. On top of that, I am running a X2 replicated bucket. Now since I am running a single host, this data is replicated amongst OSDs(read HDDs), but in a multiple host cluster it would be replicated amongst multiple hosts instead.

One of the benefits to an array like this is that other types of services are easily implemented. NFS overall is pretty good, and it is possible to implement that through the UI or command line. I understand that Samba is not your favorite, but that is also possible. Personally, I am using Rados to connect my Apache Cloudstack hypervisor.

I will admit, it is not the easiest to set up, but using docker containers to manage storage is an interesting concept. On top of that, you can designate different HDDs to different pools, perhaps you want your solid state storage to be shared separately. Ceph is also capable of monitoring your HDDs with smartctl.

Proper installation does give you a web UI to manage it, if some one of your skill even needs it. ;)

NFS is pretty good

NFS is the best option if you only need to access the shared drives over your LAN. If you want to mount them over the internet, there's SSHFS.

If you already know NFS and it works for you, why change it? As long as you’re keeping it between Linux machines on the LAN, I see nothing wrong with NFS.

I think a reasonable quorum already said this, but NFS is still good. My only complaint is it isn't quite as user-mountable as some other systems.

So...I know you said no SAMBA, but SAMBA 4 really isn't bad any more. At least, not nearly as shit as it was.

If you want a easily mountable filesystem for users (e.g. network discovery/etc.) it's pretty tolerable.

NFS is still the standard. Were slowly seeing better adoption of VFS for things like hypervisors.

Otherwise something like SFTPgo or Copyparty if you want a solution that supports pretty much every protocol.

For smaller folders I like using syncthing, that way it's like having multiple updated backups

I'd use an s3 bucket with s3fs. Since you want to host it yourself, Minio is the open-source tool to use instead of s3.

NFS is still useful. We use it in production systems now. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

And if you have a dedicated system for this, I’d look into TrueNAS Scale.

If it's for backup, zfs and btrfs can send incremental diffs quite efficiently (but of course you'll have to use those on both ends).

Otherwise, both NFS and SMB are certainly viable.

I tried both but TBH I ended up just using SSHFS because I don't care about becoming and NFS/SMB admin.

NFS and SMB are easy enough to setup, but then when you try to do user-level authentication... they aren't as easy anymore.

Since I'm already managing SSH keys all over my machines, I feel like SSHFS makes much more sense for me.

I still use sshfs. I can't be bothered to set up anything else I just want something that works out of the box.

The fact that you say using NFS makes you old makes me feel like fucking Yoda

NFS is really good inside a LAN, just use 4.x (preferably 4.2) which is quite a bit better than 2.x/3.x. It makes file sharing super easy, does good caching and efficient sync. I use it for almost all of my Docker and Kubernetes clusters to allow files to be hosted on a NAS and sync the files among the cluster. NFS is great at keeping servers on a LAN or tight WAN in sync in near real time.

What it isn't is a backup system or a periodic sync application and it's often when people try to use it that way that they get frustrated. It isn't going to be as efficient in the cloud if the servers are widely spaced across the internet. Sync things to a central location like a NAS with NFS and then backups or syncs across wider WANs and the internet should be done with other tech that is better with periodic, larger, slower transactions for applications that can tolerate being out of sync for short periods.

The only real problem I often see in the real world is Windows and Samba (sometimes referred to as CIFS) shares trying to sync the same files as NFS shares because Windows doesn't support NFS out of the box and so file locking doesn't work properly. Samba/CIFS has some advantages like user authentication tied to active directory out of the box as well as working out of the box on Windows (although older windows doesn't support versions of Samba that are secure), so if I need to give a user access to log into a share from within a LAN (or over VPN) from any device to manually pull files, I use that instead. But for my own machines I just set up NFS clients to sync.

One caveat is if you're using this for workstations or other devices that frequently reboot and/or need to be used offline from the LAN. Either don't mount the shares on boot, or take the time to set it up properly. By default I see a lot of people get frustrated that it takes a long time to boot because the mount is set as a prerequisite for completing the boot with the way some guides tell you to set it up. It's not an NFS issue; it's more of a grub and systemd (or most equivalents) being a pain to configure properly and boot systems making the default assumption that a mount that's configured on boot is necessary for the boot to complete.

For all its flaws and mess, NFS is still pretty good and used in production.

I still use NFS to file share to my VMs because it still significantly outperforms virtiofs, and obviously network is a local bridge so latency is non-existent.

The thing with rsync is that it's designed to quickly compute the least amount of data transfer to sync over a remote (possibly high latency) link. So when it comes to backups, it's literally designed to do that easily.

The only cool new alternative I can think of is, use btrfs or ZFS and btrfs/zfs send | ssh backup btrfs/zfs recv which is the most efficient and reliable way to backup, because the filesystem is aware of exactly what changed and can send exactly that set of changes. And obviously all special attributes are carried over, hardlinks, ACLs, SELinux contexts, etc.

The problem with backups over any kind of network share is that if you're gonna use rsync anyway, the latency will be horrible and take forever.

Of course you can also mix multiple things: rsync laptop to server periodically, then mount the server's backup directory locally so you can easily browse and access older stuff.

For linux only, lan only shared drive NFS is probably the easiest you'll get, it's made for that usecase.

If you want more of a dropbox/onedrive/google drive experience, Syncthing is really cool too, but that's a whole other architecture qhere you have an actual copy on all machines.

I use sshfs.

I still have to use SAMBA as Win 11 hates NFS with a passion and we have Win 11 boxes here supplied as work machines so no changing. Also wifeys gaming rig is Windows as she don't want to mess around getting stuff to work...
But hey - for everything else it is NFS with all of its weirdness, but it just works a bit better than SMB

Stick with NFS, and use e.g. rsync for backup. Or subversion, if you want to be super-safe.

I use NFS for linking VMs and Docker containers to my file server. Haven't tried it for desktop usage, but I imagine it would work similarly.

truenas is cool. I've only used core so far, but i hear scale is taking over

LAN or internet?

Https is king for internet protocols.

Everyone forgets about WebDAV.

It's a little jank, but it does work on Windows. If you copy a file in, it doesn't show up in the file manager until you refresh. But it works.

It's also multithreaded, which isn't the case for SMB. This is especially good if you host it on SSDs.

Check out SyncThing, which can sync a folder of your choice across all 3 devices

[edit] oops, just saw you don't plan on using it

In that case, if you use KDE, you can use Dolphin to set up network drives to your local network machines through SSH

TrueNas is pretty top notch and offers a variety of storage and protocol options. If you're at all familiar with Linux style OS, it should be pretty easy to work with. Setting up storage comes with a little bit of a learning curve, but it's not too bad. This SAN/NAS OS is polished, performant, and extensible. If you're not planning on using SMB or Samba, you can most certainly use NFS, or iSCSI if that's your thing.

I have SFTPgo in a docker container with attached storage. Can access it through many protocols, but on linux I mount it via WebDav.

Whats neat is that I can also share files/folders with either other registered users or with a password or download only link and it has a web gui for that.

Sounds like NFS might still be the way to go for you.

For backups personally I use Restic and connect over SFTP via SSH, since that's just built in and doesn't need any configuration.

For more traditional file sharing I use WebDAV with SFTPGo, since I need windows and android compatibility too, and webdav is pretty easy to setup and use.

And I also use Syncthing for keeping some directories in sync between devices.