Hello everyone

[Dave Boulden]

I have been a FreeNAS user for about 6 months when I installed it on my backup server as a direct replacement for Windows Server Essentials when they dumped the backup feature.

My server spec is in my signature. I have the server providing shares for documents and media, the latter also being served across my network by a plex server running in a jail. I'm using BackupPC4 in a jail for backup duties and have LibreNMS running on an Ubuntu VM for server monitoring.

I develop web (and occasional desktop) software predominantly for the national newspaper and magazine industry and also build websites (currently favouring WordPress but previously have used Drupal) for local businesses. My current dev work is mostly in Angular 9 with NodeJS, Express and MongoDB on the back end.

 

[jgreco]

Welcome to the forums! So, is it any better than WSE in your opinion? Not fishing for any particular answer, be honest, actually curious.

 

[Dave Boulden]

Had Microsoft continued with the backup feature in WSE, I would have stuck with it as it worked very well for me, even able to back up Linux servers and an old Mac desktop to it. However, they slowly 'hobbled' it from version to version until it became unusable for me.

FreeNAS has so far been a very capable replacement, though nowhere near as plug-and-play as WSE *was*. It has worked well for me so far bar one issue I'm having with running BackupPC in jail trying to make it access a separate peer-to-peer 10GbE LAN at the same time as my standard 1GbE LAN.

FreeNAS does 'bare its innards' far more than WSE does/did, but as a techie person, I find it more useful having very granular control over certain features presented uniformly.

 

[jgreco]

I had a somewhat similar experience with MacOS Server, which used to be quite competent at a whole bunch of stuff. It's unfortunate when products take such a turn.