h3ndrik

How have you tested this? You need to use the external IP address of your router (public ip) to open it. And you need to test that from another internet connection. Also make sure the browser is actually trying to open an http connection to port 80. Some modern browsers / addons try to prefer https on port 443 instead and that wouldn't be reachable. Does a ping work? What's the exact error message? The port forward could be wrong. Needs to be port 80 (TCP) towards the internal device where nextcloud runs, to the port where it runs on that machine (could be 80, too). It could also be blocked by your provider, or your specific provider doesn't allow port forwards. Or you ran into issues with the shift to IPv6 addresses. Maybe your provider has some strange setup. Try if you can ping your router from external first. And try the canyouseeme.org mentioned in the other comment. That's good advice.

There are also heavy mats available in the hardware store, to put your washing machine on.

That would be the most important question.

(I usually don't advertise for using Linux in a VM on Windows. There are use-cases for that. But it combines the downsides of Windows with the limitations of your VM software and issues on Linux (for example the proprietary NVidia drivers and whatever they do to pass through parts of the hardware, or weird stuff VirtualBox does). And it can make it slow(er) to unusable in some cases. None of that has anything to do with Linux, but people try it that way and blame issues on Linux, when it's really the VM software's fault. (Or you ticked the wrong config checkbox.)

A better way to do it would be trying a live image on an USB stick, testing performance and then looking for performance issues within your whole virtualization stack if you absolutely have to use Linux within a VM. This is certainly possible. I usually dual-boot. Or do it the other way around, Windows inside a VM on a Linux host. But I don't really use Windows, so I'm not a good example.)

Maybe you want one of the turnkey solutions. There are several solutions that offer you a NAS box with everything pre-configured and a management web-interface. Assembling a RAID and creating a network share is just a few clicks with those. And they should come with documentation.

I don't really know which one is best. There is openmediavault, unraid, EasyNAS, TrueNAS, ...

I agree. Configuring everything yourself, Learning about RAID, filesystems, networking and file servers on an operating system you're not familiar with is some work. And although Linux has adapted quite some Windows-workflows, setting up Samba isn't necessarily the right-click - properties - share you learned from using windows.

For security cameras there are solutions like Frigate which can be installed in a container.

100% agree. Software RAID is the thing you want as a consumer. Doesn't need to be ZFS. mdraid is another good and well tested option for the traditional way of using RAID.