How do people normally manage files directly on TrueNAS?

TrueNAS General
1

Hi,

I am fairly new to TrueNAS and also quite new to Unix based systems, so it is very possible that I have simply missed something obvious.

After running TrueNAS for a little while I started wondering how file management is normally intended to work. In the web UI I can see datasets and configure shares, permissions, snapshots, and so on, but I cannot browse the folders or files inside the datasets.

Because of that I have been using SMB shares from Windows, which works fine for accessing files. However, it seems a bit inefficient for some operations. For example, when moving files between two folders on the same dataset, the data appears to travel over the network to my PC and then back to the NAS again, instead of being handled locally on the server.

This made me wonder if I might be missing the intended workflow.

Some examples of what I mean are things like:

  • Moving large directories within the same dataset

  • Reorganizing files or media libraries

  • Extracting archives

  • Browsing files directly on the NAS

Is the normal approach simply to use SMB/NFS from a client machine, or are there recommended tools or workflows within TrueNAS itself that people usually use for this?

Since I am still learning both TrueNAS and Unix systems, there is a good chance I am overlooking something obvious, so I would really appreciate any advice or pointers.

Regards

2

You’re not missing anything. As of Right now truenas has no buildin filebrowser. There will be one with truenas 26 later this year, but it’s tied to the cloud service truenas connect

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3

As Lars says, no, you aren’t missing anything. File management on the NAS is really intended to be done via the various file-sharing protocols, and some features have been introduced in Samba over recent years (like server-side copy) to make this speedier than it had been.

As of now, if you want to manage files directly on the NAS, other than standard Linux command-line tools like ls, cp, rm, etc., TrueNAS has also shipped with mc, the Midnight Commander, for some time:

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