For local storage an SMB share on your TrueNAS without any extra apps is enough. Commonly this will be mounted as a drive letter like E:, F:, Z:, … on your Windows client.
Just place your documents there and they will be “on the NAS”. Of course you can live edit with Excel, Word and friends. Even from multiple computers but not the same document at the same time. But Windows will take care of that. If you have the document open on one client and a second one opens it, that will be read-only.
As Dan alreay explained, Nextcloud is intended for remote access where simple Windows sharing is considered insecure or plain will not work.
So if you want to access your documents while traveling, then Nextcloud is one way to do that.
Definitely from experience and I’ve also heard similar experience from other users that have also experienced it on other forums.
Admittedly, the last time I’ve used NextCloud was at least 3 years ago, so it may be a little outdated and they may have improved it now.
Still though, I don’t think NextCloud can ever compete in terms of performance and reliability because of the fundamental difference in implementation. Seafile kind of works in a similar way git does, which grants them that decisive advantage, though at the cost of not being able to see the raw files, but personally, I think it’s a tradeoff that is worth making.
Nextcloud is used for several of my apps apps between IOS/MacOS. For example, a password app I have, it uses nextcloud automatic sync to keep up to date. Also, I can edit docs locally on IOS that I created on the Mac. So, as Dan says, sort of like Google Cloud et al. I use it becuase I don’t want to use other cloud services.
It is also used for people with privacy concerns, like me. I use it to host my calendar and address book too, using the same apps as I use otherwise as it supports caldav.
But also as has been mentioned, you have to consider what is your actual use case. Nextcloud never ever breaks for me, but I don’t use the app, I use my own yaml and updates are trivial, it just runs.
The better source for assistance with nextcloud as far as warning messages, etc. is actually nextcloud forums. There is nothing about Truenas that makes it special, unless you are using the truenas app version I suppose. So, the solutions to those dashboard warning messages are easily found in the nextcloud forums.
And HTTPS is absolutely not just about access from the internet, it’s an encryption and that helps even in local LAN because anything on that network might be listening to unencrypted traffic. With just reverse proxy, few bucks for a domain, local DNS server, free Let’s Encrypt certificate you can have all services on their own subdomains with valid certificate and no warnings or erros. And internet doesn’t even need to know any of your IPs.
And HTTPS is absolutely not just about access from the internet, it’s an encryption and that helps even in local LAN because anything on that network might be listening to unencrypted traffic. With just reverse proxy, few bucks for a domain, local DNS server, free Let’s Encrypt certificate you can have all services on their own subdomains with valid certificate and no warnings or erros. And internet doesn’t even need to know any of your IPs.
You can even take that further. The way I host my stuff is I only use IPv6, which basically completely eliminates all the bot scanner noise that you’d normally get when you host things on the internet. I also add an mTLS verification for the clients on my Caddy reverse proxy in addition to the server TLS. This makes it so only approved clients can even connect to the server. If the client isn’t able to verify itself, the corresponding app backend won’t even see the traffic cause Caddy won’t even forward the connection.
There is, however, a fairly major downside to the mTLS addition. Most mobile apps, unfortunately don’t support it. The two that I know of that does support it are Immich and Bitwarden Android; so the majority of the time, you will have to resort to using a web browser. The other downside is obviously it adds extra complexity to setup the client certificates on client devices and you also have the extra burden of PKI management.
