Dude that software is so tight.

Seriously though I use TrueNAS personally but I’ve heard really good things about Unraid.

First think about the storage setup and how you’re gonna backup. The fruit thing comes later.

I use proxmox

Ultimately many people progress from a ready made solution like those you mentioned to more standard Linux distros as those are more flexible if you want to do something other than NAS.

OpenMediaVault is the closest to regular Debian, so if you see yourself progressing like this, it is probably the best choice for learning.

I started with truenas core, then moved to truenas scale. I tried a couple others but ultimately truenas had an easier and cleaner ui and i wanted an easy way to use nextcloud without having to do too much work.

Turns out nextcloud doesn’t seem to work right now, probably a user error in the container deployment, so I’ve not done that again. Most of the containers I’ve tried using I end up just building vms for because it’s more flexible. Right now I have 2 720xd one is truenas storage, the other is proxmox. They’re both on 10g network to a switch so using truenas to store data for the vms on my proxmox isn’t a big deal at all.

In any case like I said I don’t really use the truenas box for much other than storage which is a shame, there’s a boat load of memory and like 32 cores. Currently I backup to USB drives. Not great, but I also don’t want to burn my money on cloud storage or hefty external raid enclosures. Tape would be cool, but again I’m a cheap boi.

When it comes down to it, this is what is recommend. Write down a list of what you’re requirements are and what you’d like to see. Compare the filer oses and pick ones that meet the requirements and what you like. Then just install them and see what the look and feel is.

Don’t forget backups, people will preach gospel about needing 1x2x3 or some sort of other potentially expensive backup solution. If this is a home lab, do what fits your budget, skill, comfort levels. You can always improve from there. External drives work fine for me, will they both fail at some point sure, but nothings perfect and more important data is backed up to encrypted blobs in free cloud storage.

Also remember to take your time. It’s easy to Leroy Jenkins some shit and just go in guns a blazing, but if you take your time and read and make sure you understand the important stuff before you implement, you’ll save a ton of time. Unlike me who had to blow out my zfs impingement once after 5 tb were uploaded and kept screwing up my backups. Glad I didn’t loose data, but easily could have happened.

Most of those options come down to what you want from them. TrueNAS, Openmediavault, and Unraid are storage options with the ability to run VMs or Containers. Hypervisors (ESXI, Proxmox, etc) run VMs and containers, but are not really designed for storage. It gets a bit muddy since there is a lot of overlap. You could run TrueNAS as a VM on a hypervisor.

I keep things separate. My storage runs bare metal storage OS (UnRaid and another TrueNAS). My server handles all the heavy services and Internet facing services. For a homelab, go nuts. Try an all-in-one server. If you have equipment, try multiple things. I've ran all different storage on my server to see what I liked best. Just make sure to have routine backups no matter what options you choose. Nothing is worse than a major failure and losing it all.