A few years ago, I encountered a situation with my personnal computer. Overnight, it started mounting my /home as read-only. Everything seems to indicate that my hard drive was about to fail. I was doing regular backups, but not nearly often enough… After making an emergency backup and changing the falty disk, it was time to consider a more reliable solution. The following christmas, my life partner offered me a Synology NAS and I started doing daily backups using Borg.

And for or a while, it worked fine.

But one day, Borg started to fail doing backups. It turns out that my NAS had too few RAM to run Borg. So I started running it on my own computer, mounting the repo on a local path using NFS. It worked, but I knew I could only be satisfied for so long. At some point, I would have to replace the NAS with something more powerful…

And then, a few months ago, that point came and I started to look for a replacement. Synology’s machines are nice for beginners. They do the job. But I’m a developer. And a nerd. So this time, I wanted something I could entirely control. I wanted something I could install an OS of my choice on, so I chose the QNAP TS-673A. I then stated to test several NAS OS, including TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault and Rockstor; none of which satisfied me.

My main pain point with these open-source OSes is that they are more geared towards business than domestic use: they all lack a disk, filesystem and file manager as powerful as the Synology OS. Plus most of them rely on some form of containerization (Docker or plain LXC) to manage applications, which results in a poor catalog of available third-party apps.

I’m going on a adventure

As I was complaining about this on my social networks, someone mentionned YunoHost as a possible solution. To be honest, at first I though it really was a stupid idea. YunoHost is a server OS, not a domestic NAS OS. But then, reflecting on that idea, I thought YunoHost was not missing much to be an acceptable domestic NAS OS. It already has a huge and maintained catalog of third-party apps, an extensively documented administration interface and Nextcloud can be used as a powerful files manger. At least at first.

All in all, YunoHost is not missing much. The main missing feature was an administration interface to manage disks and filesystems. And it turns out the YunoHost project already knows that, there’s even an opened issue. So I stepped in and suggested a rough roadmap. A few weeks later, the YunoHost team organised a sprint in Paris, which I attended and had the opportunity to coordinate with the core-team to develop that feature.

So here we are now. There’s a roadmap, a clear way forward and I started to work on this. I estimate it needs at least a year of development. I won’t be working full time on this. But now I know that the team will be there to follow this development and they’re really interested in getting it added to YunoHost. Of course, I will keep posting here every now and then when I make progress on my developments.