A year ago I built a NAS to reduce my reliance on cloud services, and set up an arr stack. I went with TrueNAS Scale, which was on Bluefin at the time. In the past 12 months, TrueNAS Scale has been through FOUR major OS versions, with a fifth already announced. At least one of those involved a release train switch so, despite diligently checking for updates in the dashboard, I was left in the dust with an obsolete OS, and didn’t find out until it was already a huge hassle to upgrade.

I’ve been really happy with the utility and benefit of having this tool, but holy smokes how is anybody supposed to keep up with all of this? This is far from my only hobby, and I simply do not have the time, patience, or interest for a constant race to keep up with vetting new release versions and fixing what breaks every 3 weeks. I have enough tinkering hobbies as it is.

On top of that, there’s the whole blow up with TrueCharts, which has also left me with an entire suite of obsolete albatrosses around my NAS that I need to deal with. Am I still waiting for them to figure out an upgrade path? I don’t even know anymore.

Sorry for the rant, but I guess what I’m looking for is: how do you keep up with the constant maintenance and updates, and where do I go from here, in February 2025, with a system running Bluefin 22.12, a 32TB ZFS pool (RAIDZ1) that has to remain intact, and a handful of TrueCharts apps that I don’t want to lose the data from (e.g. Jellyfin configs/watch history)?

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 hours ago

    Constant maintenance? What’s that?

    Here’s my setup:

    • OS - openSUSE Leap - I upgrade when I remember
    • software - Docker images in a docker compose file; upgrading is a simple docker command, and I’ll only do it if I need something in the update
    • hardware - old desktop; I’ll upgrade when I have extra hardware

    I honestly don’t think about it. I run updates when I get to it (every month or so), and I’ll do an OS upgrade a little while after a new release is available (every couple years?). Software gets updated periodically if I’m bored and avoiding more important things. And I upgrade one thing at a time, so I don’t end up with everything breaking at once. BTRFS snapshots means I can always roll back if I break something.

    I don’t even know what TrueCharts is. Maybe that’s your issue?