This has been quite the learning experience for me. I knew absolutely nothing at the start of this, although I had a pretty good background understanding of computers in general, but only with Windows machines. I just knew I wanted to take back control of my data.

I installed TrueNAS on an old i7 3770k system with 32GB of DDR3 RAM.

At first, I (heavily) used AI to help me with installing community apps, navigating the file system and permissions because I just didn't understand it. As I went, I learned more and more and went well beyond where I expected to stop.

Fast forward to now, I have a pretty good understanding of Linux and Docker in general. I ditched Windows on two other machines in favor of CachyOS and Ubuntu, and I am using those other two machines to run services complementing my server stack.

My thoughts:

• Docker is amazing. I am in constant awe of the capabilities that Docker has and really how easy it is to use once you understand how it works.
• Don't expose your services to the internet if you can help it. I have Ubiquiti hardware so everything is utilized via VPN when I am away from home.
• Physical disks will fail. I lost two drives during this time. One showed bad sectors after maybe 3 months, and its replacement was DoA. Luckily, I did not lose any data, but I do offsite backups to Backblaze weekly, my app pool is mirrored to another disk inside the server as well as pushed via rsync weekly to my CachyOS and Ubuntu systems.
• Learn how to use the shell and shell commands.
• Problems with things are permissions related 99% of the time.
• The "arr" stack is amazing. It's like magic.

Thanks for reading.